


The Cumbrous Elements - Safe Version

by Phase7



Series: Quoting John Milton for Teens and Aces [3]
Category: Rockman X | Mega Man X, Rockman Zero | Mega Man Zero, Rockman | Mega Man - All Media Types
Genre: Intrigue, Mild Gore, Mild Language, Minor Character Death, Multi, Non-Consensual Kissing, Protective Siblings, Rare Pairings, Technobabble
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-05-18 20:45:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 48,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5942554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phase7/pseuds/Phase7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Political intrigue when MMX meets MMZ.<br/>The ELF wars have ended, but the humans that X protects in Neo Arcadia are still under attack by the terrorist organisation Heaven's Army. When Rock arrives with his reploid family and friends to help, he finds that the situation is worse than he imagined : both Neo Arcadia and X's affections lie broken under the wheel of war. As the city crumbles and is reborn, Rock and Zero must work together to bring back X's true smile.<br/>This is the Rated Teen version suitable for most audiences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I curse this race of Heav'n thus trampl'd,

**Author's Note:**

> This is a version of The Cumbrous Elements' story with no adult scenes and milder swear words. There are still oblique mentions of adult relationships between characters. I hope the reader will not be offended by the occasional kiss or raunchy joke. There remain violent scenes within the plot, and light swearing, so please take note of tags.  
> This fic follows a series. Reading those fics is not required: the first chapter acts as a bridge. Previously, the moon had received a suspiciously formal letter from X asking for help in Neo Arcadia.

Lumine moaned at the piles of paperwork in front of him. Actual paperwork was the worst in the digital age, but Earth had requested physical forms. The light through the tall gothic windows cut from the tower's moon rock spilled over his crossed legs in an icy white blue. His long and lanky 1912 tea gown spilled around his feet and those of his tall backed working chair. His old desk grew a forest of folded forms and metallic legal machinery. It was a headache to deal with, even for a reploid who had been built to be a manager. He longed for the slow hours at the end of the day when he could fall into Rock's embrace and when Bass would be relatively quiet. Nearby, Bass wasn't improving Lumine's concentration at all by bouncing a baseball at the wall over and over.

Getting a good view of his husbands' languid distress, Rock ran into the room and right past Bass' sudden curveball. The throw missed Rock completely, but managed to topple over one of Lumine's monitors.

"Hey, Rock, Rock— Hey." Bass called after the small blue robot until he hurried back out of the private quarters he'd rushed into.

"We leave tomorrow! We have to pack," Rock admonished. He turned right back around and disappeared down the short blue-carpeted hall.

"Can't you play catch with Bass first," Lumine called after Rock.

Reëmerging with an arm full of clothes, Rock frowned at his two husbands who were still sitting around shamefully. "I can't believe you're abetting Bass, Lumine! We have to finish packing."

Rock was utterly goal focused on the upcoming meeting on Earth, and he had been since he'd picked up X's note from Cedar's transmission station. They'd been in bed when the letter came in, and he'd missed hours of prep time thanks to that, so he wasn't going to let it happen again. He had to make sure that their away team was assembled, and that the supplies were locked in and correct to the new specifications, and that Bass wasn't currently fighting someone or goofing around so he could be taught how to act politely again.

"C'mon, Rock. You're way too tense. Let's play some football," Bass offered.

"You don't even have a football!" Rock whined.

"You can play football anywhere, wearing any thing. Rooftops, tuxedos, birthday parties, the works." Bass' continued incitements were not working.

"I don't want to play right now! I want to pack, and I want you to study the rules of court behaviour X sent." Rock tamped his foot.

Lumine flipped his dress to the side and stood up, figuring completing the forms at his desk was a lost cause. He walked up Rock with a chaste kiss for the bot's brunette head. "I am going to finish filling out our entry visas in my library," Lumine said. "I'll be right out to help you pack."

"Yeah, what about me?!" Bass yelled from beside the large marble desk.

"Play basketball with the poubelle, you piece of trash," Lumine suggested.

Bass glared at the small waste basket Lumine had referred to. In revenge, he picked up the nearest piece of paper. "I'm gonna make spitballs outta your acquisitions report!"

"I'd expect no better from you," Lumine said airily as he walked out of the room, waving his hand without even looking back.

As soon as Lumine returned with the visas, Rock pulled him into the process of packing just the right things to wear as ambassadors and just the right things to bring for energencies. Rock also pushed a list of rules at Bass. Bass used it to cover the loogie he'd hawked into the trashcan. He'd lie about reading it later.

Frankly, other than Rock's hurry to pack for the trip, that was how the three husbands were. They filled out a Freudian trine where Bass and Lumine endlessly squabbled and Rock tried to hug them both. The fighting, the judgement, and the reproach were all produced by love. Usually, Rock was forever caring and conciliatory, forgiving everything about them, and only asking for understanding from everyone he met. Surely someone as unfailingly nice as he could be forgiven for one cross day.

It was a shame that the bad day seemed to last forever until Rock finally had everyone packed, briefed, and in the hangar waiting to depart to Earth. Even Dr. Light, taken out of his memory canisters and installed in his new reploid body, had rolled his eyes when he thought no one would notice. Wood Man had noticed and said nothing. Right outside of the ship where the small group waited under seatbelts to finally blast off, Rock was excitedly confirming last minute details with Roll. She would be the Moon Director with Lumine gone, after all. Was she sure she was appraised of Lumine's fifth phase plans? Was she on top of the new irrigation initiative? Would she remember the incoming asteroids and the mets stationed to mine them? Of course she would, because she was already the Vice Director. With this determination, and to everyone's cheering, Roll pushed her brother into the shuttle, locked him in his seat, and wished everyone a safe trip.

Rock finally calmed down once the shuttle was out of the moon's gravitational pull. Lumine's hand on his may have helped. Bass' big finned helmet leaning against Rock's head wasn't helping in the comfort category, but did score him moral points for trying.

Because of the precious live cargo on board in the hold, the descent to planet Earth took hours, just as it ever had for traditional craft. Wood Man spent most of the time out of his seat to comfort the animals. Most of them were insects, but he refused to believe that they didn't deserve concern. The queen bees were all peeping in excitement. Turbo Man was rumbling softly in engine dreams.

Back in the main cabin, Dive Man went into standby. Sleep was his preferred pastime, although he drifted out of his randomly generated dreams whenever his keen sense of hearing picked up on a piece of the many abandoned satellites that would hit the craft. Junk Man and the reploid-renewed Dr. Wily spent the whole time training up and battling Pokémon teams on DSes scrounged from the Earth's last shipment of electronic waste. The handheld consoles had been thrown away because their batteries had given out ; Junk Man powered them himself with wires and glue. Dr. Light alternated between his novel and looking over Wily's shoulder. Bass didn't even pretend to be doing anything else and offered constant battle commentary loudly. Rock dozed weakly, fingers still intertwined with Lumine's. And Trucker Joe? He piloted the bulky space craft as it burned back onto Earth. The flames reflected off of his black visor... and the sunglasses underneath.

As the sun painted the young crescent moon in old-lace yellow, the diplomatic shuttle docked in the long since humbled and broken Jakob Tower. Ancient iron clamps grumbled out of the walls to hold the shuttle, still emblazoned with sun-bleached Noah Corp logos. The pleather on the public seating was cracked and flaking into alligator scales over mouldering foam, but the aluminium chair legs and white tile floor inside the lobby were still kept clean, if stale. The entire area had likely been cleaned after the Moon's last visit, then sealed up. The upper floors of the tower had slept for centuries.

Leaving Trucker Joe and Turbo Man to deal with transporting supplies via the service elevator, the eight robots and reploids left over headed to the civilian lifts. There were two cars going down, just enough to split the party four on four and get under the weight limit. Otherwise, they would have had to take the stairs. Perhaps that would have been the better idea. The elevators descended through large glass tubes which had been built to show off the sights of a revitalised Earth to tourists. Anti-glare film disassociated from the glass and blurred the view from the upper floors, but what could be seen below them where the city opened up beneath the clouds was damning enough.

Boils of burnt city blocks marred the flesh of Neo Arcadia. Some toppled overpasses still smouldered, and a plume of smoke scrambled out of the burning gas lines. The city was pockmarked by explosion craters and seeping sinkholes. Ash-dusted mets worked hard on the perimeter of each disaster zone, trying to fix the earth and bring the inflammation of war under control. Bass salivated just looking at it.

There was no question as to why X had called for a diplomatic meeting sooner than scheduled, and why his new rules of court behaviour were more than ever preoccupied with the safety of the Neo Arcadian humans. But things still sat uncomfortably for Rock. He didn't like having to keep his group out of human culture, even if it was for their safety. It was as if X were expecting them to fight. He didn't want to fight. He hadn't come to deliver troops. This was an aid mission.

Bass and Rock looked at each other, excitement meeting dread. Rock frowned. It would be so hard to keep him out of trouble.

"Remember, you're here to be our bodyguard, okay?" Rock said.

Bass looked angrily confused, then growled. He slammed himself back into the far wall, making the descending car rattle dangerously.

"Don't get us killed before then," Dive Man muttered in Russian. Bass didn't speak that but was still 100% sure he'd just been insulted. Rock held Bass' Arm before it could even twitch.

"We're all upset," Rock said, though he was speaking mostly for himself. "It's been a long trip down."

The elevator continued plummeting into the sick blackness of Neo Arcadia below. In the throne room of Jakob's Tower, X awaited them. Together, the Moon and Earth would heal this broken city.

"Mmm, hexagonal columns and majestic thrones— I love what you've done with the place." Lumine gave a compliment as soon as his curtsey touched his knee to the floor before X's throne. He mostly meant it, too. The purple palace was in perfect taste for him.

X leant his cheek on a limp fist and sighed. This was going to be a long, long meeting. Mostly because Rock brought the _entire_ family. He and Bass had never gotten along, and he and Lumine had, well, history. "Th-thanks."

"Hey where's your guards?" Bass spoke up, refusing to bow until Rock grabbed him by the back of his helmet. The other reploids had already bent their backs properly, and dressed in the Neo Arcadian fashion properly too.

"We passed the Four Guardians on the way in," Rock said quietly.

"No. Guards. The little copies," Bass insisted.

"Copies!" X gasped.

"I said I wanted a battalion of them to beat up, like last time." Bass said.

"We're short—" X closed his eyes and tapped at his armrest to centre and calm himself.

"Bass, this is the opposite of being polite!" Rock said and threw down his hands.

"We're short staffed," X continued. "The Recycling Program can't build new bodies fast enough to re-house the flood of orphaned IC chips. We can't bring the humans back." X looked bitterly at Dr. Light. He was in a reploid body now because he'd uploaded himself as the first ELF. But had he passed this technology on to humanity so that humans could be freed from the death of war? He'd probably thought it would be pushing humanity too hard in the direction of transhumanism before it was "ready." But he didn't have to see everyone around him die. X looked away.

"The program was strained already," X said. "Now civilians see nothing but soldiers coming out. They think that it's a death camp for dissidents, and they won't come to have the Maverick Virus removed. Then they attack each other and kill humans. All because of those _lies_ spread by Heaven's Army."

"If it's Heaven's Army," Bass broke in, "I can take care of Heaven's Army. Hey, no!" Bass held his hand up to Rock's and Lumine's faces sequentially as they were trying to talk. "This is what this whole thing is about, right?"

"The deterioration of Earth's society and ecosphere is more complex than one terrorist group," Lumine corrected.

"But they're mostly mavericks. It's not hurting humans if I tug out their motor relays," Bass reasoned. Everyone else in the room immediately grimaced. "What? It's not killing them. Just pour antivirus on their brains and give them new bodies in your stupid Recycling Program. If you'd let me destroy Heaven's Army two years ago, you wouldn't have any of these problems. I can do it! Just let me out of here and I will pull Heaven's Army down to Earth and crush them under my feet!"

"Heaven's Army will s—" X swallowed, then exited his throne to grab a glass of water from a nearby decanter. After one swallow and with the delicate liquid still in his hand, he continued speaking with a whithering look toward Bass. "Soon be taken care of. I have plans."

"Yeah well," Bass spoke up. Rock clapped a hand over his mouth and spoke louder.

"You don't have to have plans alone," Rock said. "You can rely on your Four Guardians, and us, your family."

Glass shattered on the floor. Rock saw the cup slip. Bass saw X throw it.

"The Four Guardians are useless!" X yelled.

"X! Are you all right?" Rock rushed over and immediately began brushing up the slivers of glass with his vest. With the bulky ceremonial garment off him, he looked younger than ever when compared to his little brother.

Little Brother X put his hand to his head again and ambled back to his throne. As soon as he sat down, holographic displays of Neo Arcadia's maintenance popped up again to remind him of all the responsibilities that were ageing him by decades a day. Junk Man came over with his vacuum to help clean up the mess. Holding Rock's shoulder as a gentle encouragement, he freed Rock from the task. Rock followed X back to the throne, sucking in the worry from the blue lit screens into his eyes. X hated seeing him like that because it meant the Moon would only make things more complicated, as usual.

"X, please, trust us. We'll help you with the energy crisis, and if we can, we'll heal the damage caused by Heaven's Army too," Rock said. He wanted to touch his brother. He wanted to run up and hug X like he used to, even during the ELF wars. He looked so tired. That's why he needed a hug, and that was why he didn't want one. Rock knew X always held himself up to an inhumanly high standard that not even a reploid could reach. He took punishment for other people to absolve them of their sins with his own suffering. That was a habit he'd learned from Zero. Rock wished he hadn't.

"This is an aid mission," X said. He looked at the group awkwardly standing in a semicircle. They were trying not to focus their attention too much on Junk Man. Lumine was holding Bass decisively by the arm. Dr. Light, the man who was supposed to be his father, looked unhappy. Well, everyone was unhappy. X was the unhappiest of all. But he wouldn't be for long. "All here?"

"All here?" Lumine echoed, perhaps to process the statement. "Yes, we brought the personnel and supplies you requested."

"We just want to help," Rock reïterated.

"Dive Man has come to repair plumbing systems," Lumine began explaining, "and to conduct underwater salvage. Junk Man will assist in land salvage and construction. Wood Man has brought breeding populations to reëstablish species and will evaluate the population density in Neo Arcadia. Dr. Light has come at your request, I assume because of his expertise in your systems or in preliminary ELF construction. Turbo Man and our Trucker Joe will help with the reconstruction efforts once they return."

"R-return?" X was rightly confused. His gaze immediately fixated on the last person present, the one who hadn't yet been introduced. X remembered him bowing deeply and with a flourish, saying his name at the same time as Light. X didn't recognise him one bit. Some auburn redhead with a big nose and too much time spent on flyaway hair and supposedly subtle makeup.

"Wily's going to help you find Zero!" Rock said excitedly, hopping in place. This would surely be great news to share. "I mean, Dr. Wily," he corrected himself.

The gaudy man laughed. "I've accepted my losses, you know," that man, Dr. Wily, said. He had some sort of Eastern European accent between Hollywood Draculas and Tommy Wiseau. Considering reploids worked on voice banks, it had to be carefully affected, which was not endearing to X.

"What do y-you mean?" X asked.

"I created him," Wily said, hand over his heart, "to kill you, naturally. All part of that old joke between Tom and I." Wily put a hand on Light's shoulder but the other doctor shot it with a gunshot of a dirty look. The hand recoiled and then curled behind Wily's back without missing a beat. "Well, it all worked out for the best, didn't it? You invited me to your wedding."

"I don't q-quite remember." X tripped over the memory, taxing his memory banks.

"They were married before," Rock said, gently correcting the doctor with a smile. "They came to my wedding."

"Oh, that's right," Wily agreed. It had been a very long time ago. "You fought with me over who would carry the bridal crown, remember?"

"N-no," X said. The entire thing was coming up as a blank. He steeled his face and sat straight in his chair. "But I don't n-need you to find Zero. He's a-a-a— already here."

"X, are you drunk?" Wily asked point blank.

"Albert!" Light shouted, mortified.

"No!" X shouted, offended.

"You sound drunk," Wily said in a high voice, defending his question.

Rock, white faced, rushed past Bass to face the true embarrassment of the meeting and tug on his sleeve. "Papa, why did you—"

"I'm n-n-not drunk!" X stood angrily, then stomped behind his throne to one of the columns behind it. The column swivelled in on itself to reveal a secret passage. X shouted into it. "Zero!"

As if specially engineered to make an entrance, Zero emerged from the dark corridor one flash of gold at a time. He was faintly smiling, and his hair recently brushed. The thin fabrics of his body suit barely constrained his limbs, and his vest and shorts only seemed to cage him. Suited to Neo Arcadia's tastes, he looked more feral than the day he was awoken untrained.

Zero walked to X's side. X smiled in triumph. X pointed to the lunar reploids. Zero assessed them, scanning for their weaknesses. Bass and Lumine met the probe with equal hostility hardening their eyes. They couldn't feel anyone else stiffen. Where they'd been unsure before, they now agreed with Wily: something was wrong.

"Zero," X said to present the reploid. "I have him. He's b—" X grimaced. "He's been fighting Heaven's Army."

"He's alive?" Dr. Light asked, overjoyed.

"Welcome back!" Wood Man added.

"Oh, X, I'm so happy for you," Light said, stepping closer. "You— We thought he was gone! He didn't abandon you. He could never have." Although he had never known the particulars of Zero's disappearance, Light's bearded smile forgave everything.

"He's nev-e-never leaving again," X said proudly, taking Zero's hand in his.

"Where were you, Zero?" Rock asked.

"The enemy shut me away in a complex in Siberia. Harpuia knew about it for a long time, but did not tell X," Zero said, relishing the final words. Zero and X looked at each other with clear passion.

"That is why he's been demoted," X finished the thought for Zero. Their gaze smouldered until nothing was left but ash that Zero licked off his lips. "Now that I have Zero, we c-can finally end this war."

"When can we start work?" Dive Man asked with a fake cough. The room was clogging up like hot, stale oil and he didn't want to spend another moment in it.

"Your sleeping arrangements should be the same as your last visit," X said. "If you start work now, you'll awake humans. We can start in the morning. I have to introduce you to your partner on our project, Dr. Light."

"Oh, please, X," Light admonished, searching to hear X call him father. Wily walked between them.

"He's not a child, Tom," Wily said, but not unkindly. He even smiled, and kept the affable expression as he turned to Zero and X. "And nor are you, _mein Rheingold_."

Wily waited, eyebrows arching slightly behind the bangs he'd combed into a W. Zero translated the term, didn't recognise it as an endearment, and then figured it was another peculiarity of the scientist.

"Right. I'm not," Zero said. His programming and life experience informed him that Wily had probably been telling a joke. So he smiled and put on a light tone. "And we're not drunk either."

"Oh, that's good to know," Wily said as if it were an afterthought. "Dr. Light would be happy to recalibrate your vocaliser when you find the time, X."

"That won't be n-necessar-ry," X declared. His hand tightened on Zero's.

"Ah, well, I'm not your father. I have no say in it." Wily raised his palms in defeat and walked away. His shoulder bumped very slowly into Light's as he passed. "Let's make ourselves scare. Those two know-it-alls have adult things to do without our help."

"I'll remind you that you're here as a guest, Dr. Wily," X said loudly.

"I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your hospitality." Wily turned to bow again. Then he tapped at Dr. Light's back before heading to the exit. "Come, Tom, we have adult things to do too."

"We do?" Light asked, flustered.

"Of course: we're back on Earth! Think of all the taxes." Finding he wasn't being followed, Wily swivelled on his heel to beckon Light with his fingers.

Sensing it was time to go, Dive Man and Wood Man bowed before leaving. Junk Man saluted. Light scratched at his black-brown nylon hair. What a reunion.

"Do you remember the way to the guest rooms?" Light called after the Robot Masters.

"I do," Lumine said. "Shall I lead Bass there?"

"I can go myself," Bass growled, finally pulling his arm out of Lumine's light hold.

"Go with him or he'll escape," Wily ordered. Lumine nodded and stuck to Bass like glue as they left.

"Won't you go with them?" X asked Rock when Bass and Lumine were out of sight.

"They know the way," Rock said.

"You're married. You should go to-g-gether."

"You're my only brother. I haven't seen you in years. I see them every day." Rock stepped closer to X expectantly. "What have you been up to? Did you go on another honeymoon with Zero like you said you would? How did your agricultural reform pan out? Did you finish any more of those zen doodles? Zoodles?"

"Zentangles? No. I haven't done any in years."

"You showed me the scrapbook that you did during the war last time and I thought..." Rock swallowed the rest of his words. X looked confused. This probably wasn't a great time to talk about hobbies. But it should have been. He should have been dragging X by the hand to show off his own sketchbook. He should have been braiding Zero's hair. They should have been sitting under real trees and talking about legal reform like friends. They should have been sad only when visiting Axl's grave. There were fewer real trees in Neo Arcadia because of the bombings and street violence. He could see that from the window. "I'm sorry."

"It was a s-stupid pastime any way." X had turned his body slightly, presenting a slice of his shoulder to dominate Rock's view.

Zero looked between the two brothers and the two doctors with frantically bobbing black eyes. Rock looked stricken, Light was definitively uncomfortable, and Wily had his arms crossed impatiently by the door to cover up a much more calculating glower. X was cold. The sense of unease that had been fermenting in the room finally reached him. He'd tried to ignore it. But it had been curdling inside of him too. Now Rock was confirming things for him. He had his outside observer.

"I only recently came back," Zero said. He placed a hand on Rock's head, the way he always would, but failed to ruffle the dark brown hair. He was as tired as everyone else. Yet the touch jumpstarted subprocesses in Rock, immediately comforting him. Zero smiled without malice. "I was in pretty bad shape, too. And X is a damn worrywort."

"Zero," X muttered un the edge of embarrassment.

"You _are_ ," Zero emphasised. His hand travelled from Rock's head to X's shoulder, poised to drop down the powerful reploid's back. "And it's my fault for going right out to fight Heaven's Army, right?"

X sighed. His hands fidgeted at his cassock. 

"You and Rock would do the same thing," Zero said. "Saving the world must be a family flaw."

"It's not a flaw," Rock said happily. This discussion was so much more normal. It made sense now that X would be so upset about everything if he'd just gotten Zero back and they had to put their lives on the line again. It was the story of their life, but that didn't make it any easier.

"Your greatest strength. Yeah," Zero agreed with a smirk. Then his heavy hand really did mess up Rock's hair. "It's past your bedtime, pipsqueak."

"I'm older than you," Rock complained but couldn't dredge up any actual annoyance to overcome his smile.

"Unless some mavericks attack right now, X and I need to go to bed too."

"Okay." It was a bit early, but Rock agreed to Zero's assessment. He and X had to be so much more sleepy after a war than Rock was after a shuttle ride. "I'll see you in the morning."

Rock paused. He considered it. He rushed X and threw his arms around his little brother. His little brown head smooshed into the soft blue cloth of X's shoulder. He couldn't control the feeling any longer, so he said it out loud : "I missed you, lil' brother."

"I m-missed you too," X said. "And you too, father."

Upon hearing his proper name from X, Dr. Light surged onto the hug, trapping X between his giant loving body and Rock's tiny tenacious affections.

"I'm so proud of you, X," Light said. "Never forget that."

"I d-do n-need to go to my bed— bedroom," X choked out between the double reploid hugs.

"See, I told you he had adult things to do," Wily snarked from the doorway. "Come here, Tom, and let them have some privacy. Rock." Wily gestured with his fingers, snapped them twice, and then used his entire arm when the X hug stayed solid.

Rock and Light managed to pry themselves off of the target of their affection. As they walked back to join Wily with nothing but bright smiles, Wily caught Zero's eye. Those black eyes were unreadable. Zero's lips parted, words bundled up behind his ceramic teeth. None of them could escape. Wily led Rock and Light out the door.

The Four Guardians hadn't stuck around to listen, although Wily was certain that a scan would reveal the phantom nearby. It took him twenty footsteps to remember that he had that power now. He strained his ears and eyes. There was nothing. A microphone was picking up everything back in the throne room, but down the dark and empty hallway, there was nothing. The radio silence was far more foreboding than the tiny orange lights that held the hall on the brink of total darkness.

"Rock, could you scan for bugs?" Wily asked in a soft but unobtrusive voice.

"Hm? Why?" Rock asked as they rounded the first corner on the way to the guest quarters.

"Because I hate eavesdroppers. There's nothing more rude than having your evil plans spoiled."

"Such a brash admission," Lumine said. Rock looked way from Wily, startled. Lumine was standing against the wall with Bass. Lumine melted out of the shadowed lavender that camouflaged him. "Are you so soon to be up to no good?"

"I'm up to here already." Wily mimed a cut across his throat. "This whole place is so flooded with trouble the rats are swimming to safety. So scan."

"I already did," Lumine said. "The palace has abysmal radio security. You can teleport through the entire complex after cracking a six digit code. No one is monitoring everything even though there's a central intelligence room. I am currently cracking it."

"Good, please continue." Wily nodded then continued down the hall, pulling Light with him once he saw the taller man's confusion.

"No, stop," Light ordered. Lumine responded to them both with the silence that translated to insubordination ; neither of them was in any position to order him. Light rubbed back his aged pompadour and sighed. "This isn't our city. And we don't need to read X's diary, if that's what you're thinking."

"Sunday, March 4th: I'm deeply in love with Zero. No, of course I don't care about his _diary_ , Tom."

"What on Earth is the matter, Al?"

" _Mein Rheingold_ is a safety switch that I programmed into Zero's auditory processing array. It's separate from the ear itself, in the base life functions block," Wily explained. "Bass, come here."

Bass stayed in place.

"Come here, _mein Dachsrüde_."

" _Ja, Vater,_ " Bass responded then snapped. "Oh, GOD DAMMIT."

"That's how it works," Wily explains. "It's a tamper safeguard."

"Why did he get the cool word?" Bass complained, but no one was really listening.

"When they hear the switch phrase, they respond by calling me- or anyone else -father. Zero did not."

Rock gasped : "An imposter?"

"No, I think I could discern that, even at my age. It seems to be the same Zero, since we saw him during the ELF was, but— I said come here." Wily grabbed Bass by the head fin.

"And I said god dammit," Bass growled.

"I'm trying to demonstrate a part of your unique Wilybot anatomy," Wily said, tapping on the back of Bass' head. "Open. Kneel. Rock, a light?"

"Allow me," Lumine said. He smoothly slid his vest around Rock's tiny, chilly shoulders, then pulled down the zipper of his undersuit. The lights behind his chest crystals turned on brightly.

The inside of Bass' cranial circuitry came into clear focus. Wily quickly detached two decorative clips from his vest and used them like chopsticks to remove a circuit board in Bass' array. Bass found himself unsupportably unable to move. His vocaliser began emitting very loud noises even though his lips and tongue could not modulate them into words.

"If you keep that up, I'll disable your vocaliser as well," Wily warned. Bass fell silent. Using one clip as a pointer, Wily continued his explanation. "So here's my theory, or the beginnings of one. This is the audial processing centre. As you can see, it's all part of black box #2. The cognitive functions are very well protected. This larger array controls motor functions. I can slip any part out of it as I've done. Though the cranial casing and regular clamp servos keep it all locked in place when not in diagnostic mode, of course. But here is the problem. The solid state drives, up here, are 'loose' like the motor relays, with separate shelves. Now in Zero, I put the audio processor in black box #3. I didn't expect that I would be around much longer." Wily inclined his head and hand toward Dr. Light. "Until Thomas came up with his brilliant programming solution of course. A thief gives his due. All so. I put the switch in black box #3 because I did not suppose I would need it as much as I'd feared with Bass. But black box #3, right here in Bass, is loose as well. Along with other sensors, I wanted Zero's self diagnostics to update. So we reach this probability: while upgrading Zero, someone has removed or reprogrammed his black box #3."

"Why would anyone do that?" Rock asked.

"I have very little idea. It does nothing to curb his fighting abilities. His basic audio sensors still work off of black box #1. Removing black box #3 would make him easier to reprogram, and it would open up the cranial space, in a very crude way, to his adaptive motors and the leftovers of the Treble Boost system. Mmm." Wily stroked where his moustache used to be. Nothing there any more. No need to grow anything on his lip to make up for losing it on his head. Ah, but then... "If someone were to modify an exo-armour, like the Treble Boost, using its pathways: that could work. Perhaps even for remote control."

"That's horrible!" Rock exclaimed. "Who would do that? Was it Red Alert?"

"Red Alert?" Wily's hawkish nose scrunched up. Lumine's eyes widened. The cover up. Wily replaced Bass' parts and slapped his helmet shut. "No, no, Rock, they didn't do this. No one has a reason to do this. It makes absolutely no sense."

"Couldn't someone like you reprogram him for sinister purposes?" Lumine asked.

"They could. But very few people are like me," Wily said with a smile as he snapped the pieces of Bass back into place.

"How comforting," Lumine quipped.

"So is Zero sick?" Rock asked, holding Lumine's vest around him like a blanket.

"Well as your daddy would say, the boy ain't right," Wily said.

"You didn't need to tell me that," Bass said, standing back up. He punched Wily in the stomach with a crack of thunder. The reploid body crumpled over, Wily forcing wheezing moans out of his vocaliser. Bass was not taken in by the show.

"Bass!" Rock yelled. "What did you do that for?"

"He's made of metal now. He can take it," Bass said. Wily muttered impolitely in German. Light knelt down to help the doctor up, supporting the slighter body with his own solid metal mass.

"Using force to assert your dominance is very juvenile, Bass," Light said, his thick dark brows drawn down in a rare pique.

"And even if you were trying to say 'I love you,' only Lumine and I understand punching. Daddy and Papa aren't fluent in punching," Rock tried explaining.

"Maybe I need to talk louder?" Bass suggested while forming two fists and looking very suggestively at Wily's sagging body.

"Now you're just being wilfully obtuse," Lumine said with disapproval in his voice and long stride. He walked briskly to Bass, grabbed him by the fin, and continued walking down the hallway with Bass in tow and absolutely no intention of letting go. His grip was impressive. Bass' whining to be let go was less so. "I directed the robot masters to the second suite in the cross hallway. The doctors should take the first, and Rock and I will take the third."

"I'm sorry Bass punched you," Rock said to Wily with genuine concern.

"It will be fine," Wily groaned.

"It won't if he keeps doing that," Light said while supporting Wily as they limped slowly down the hallway. "What's gotten into him?"

"Sibling rivalry," Wily said with a sardonic hint of deprecation. "He never liked Zero. It's rather _my fault_."

"Oh no, Dr. Wily's sick too!" Rock moaned with a sad quiver in his voice.

Light put a hand over Wily's forehead out of habit. Wily looked at Rock with confusion. This morphed into a stunned silence as Rock kept looking at him with concern in his giant liquid blue eyes framed by the foamy lilac of Lumine's tall vest collar. Then Wily smiled. Then he snickered. Rock snickered too.

"I rubbed off on you after all," Wily said approvingly while ruffling the grown bot's hair. Like father like son.


	2. We fallen luminous array'd,

The room awaiting the lunar dignitaries was small but clean and well appointed. It contrasted with the artificial sumptuousness that each hole of the moon clawed out of meagre resources, choosing instead to flaunt its richness in simplicity. Everything in the palace could not have been made without millennia of human advancement, and brimmed with electronic streams so thick that their waves tickled at the ankles. As soon as he was out of his clothes, Lumine hopped into the bed so that its foam mattress could black his bare feet from the signals running though the floor.

The sheets were made of sewn together old t-shirts, and the comforter of unstitched stuffed animals ; a black rayon cover rested on top to hide the necessary thrift of the city that needed its arable land for crops. Lumine could even recognise the sheets since Roll and Junk Man had come up with the idea and sewn them together thirty years ago. There were so many things to be found in junkyards, after all, including entire crates of wasteful "unsold product" and "yard sard" that humans used to throw away instead of recycle. Though partly peeved that they had been relegated to the luxury of the Arcadian palace instead of given to the poor as had been intended, Lumine was pleased that their vibrant red went so well with the black comforter, and had to shamefully admit that seeing a friendly old face comforted him. Not that he needed comforting. Not that he'd admit to wanting to simply slip into sleep in the soft, worn, 100% cotton embrace of Che Guevara.

Rock argued with Bass from the minute they entered the room. They'd fought. Then they'd showered and yelled so that their anger echoed off of the tiles. It wasn't the good type of shower, or yelling. Back home, Bass had thrown his clothes on over his body that was still full of moon dust. As they'd entered the bedroom, Lumine could hear Bass still trying to touch Rock, while Rock slapped his hands away. The oldest bot was livid at Bass' behaviour the entire day, but especially Bass punching Dr. Wily in the hallway. Rock was using family outrage as a cover for his true anger over Bass' expected battle lust, Lumine inferred. Rock and Bass arguments ran circularly for half an hour while Lumine laid still on his right arm, looking only at the slat metal curtains, wide eyed and pretending to be asleep.

Finally, Rock slipped in behind Lumine, embracing his slim dark figure softly. Rock's all-too-human lips murmured wordlessly at the back of Lumine's neck and his hands that bore Dr. Light's reproduced fingerprints trailed along his side. Lumine stayed still.

"I've sent him to sleep on the couch, where he belongs," Rock said as he held Lumine's waist. Rock waited for Lumine to add a rejoinder about how worthless Bass was, but none came. "Hey, are you really asleep?"

"Not yet, but I would like to be," Lumine said, unmoving.

"You don't want to complain about Bass?" Rock removed his hands.

"Today was tiring for all of us, don't you think?"

"But I love _you_ ," Rock said as a request.

"I love you," Lumine agreed to the sentiment, but not the intended consequences, "but petty revenge through loud snarking is beneath you."

"It's not beneath you," Rock pouted.

"Don't become like me so quickly."

"Are you okay?"

"Okay?" Lumine responded with habitual lilt, then paused, actually weighing his options. The voice that followed was sad. "I don't like it when you fight him."

"I don't like it either." Rock's forehead met the bottom of Lumine's neck.

"He dislikes it as well."

"Oh no he doesn't. He loves fighting. All sorts of fighting—" Rock's grumpiness returned, but Lumine cut him off.

"Quiet. He doesn't like it when you're angry with him."

"He has a funny _punchy_ way of showing it."

"You know that's how he speaks, sometimes." Lumine was tiring of hearing a continuation of the argument.

"But I wish he wouldn't speak to me that way!"

"You don't mean that."

"I wish he wouldn't speak to you that way."

"You're angry that he punched Dr. Wily. You're angry that he wasn't on his best behaviour to meet the rest of your family. But he's never gotten along too well with them, and years of the war fraying X's nerves haven't helped, and Bass hates court presentations in general. You can't expect him to be civil."

"But— he— ugh, Lumine." Rock pushed away to sleep on the very opposite side of the bed, turning his back. "I'll go straight to sleep. Happy?"

"Happy? I'm overwhelmed with relief." Even as he said it, Lumine felt the loneliness creep back in. He was so good at pushing people away. "You can't change him, Rock. You told me that after I first met him. That's why..."

Lumine decided not to say any more. He'd been excessively candid already.

Rock understood. That was why Lumine teased Bass instead, as a way to cope with the black bot's incorrigibility. Bass was programmed to be that way, and all of his life experience had reinforced his programming. Rock loved Bass wildness. Rock loved how soft he could be, in his own way, when they were together. Rock loved how Bass tried to protect him from Lumine. Rock loved Bass, deeply, deeper than he loved Lumine, and in a way that seemed as simple as the on-off of his silicon circuits. Loving Bass felt like the flow of electricity, warm lifeblood inside his intangible heart. But why couldn't Bass change just a little? Maybe it'd be a dumb play-act for him, but couldn't Bass let Rock have the happy family he wanted, just like he remembered from two hundred years ago?

Bass had punched him then, too. Bass had been smiling the entire time.

"You're actually worried about X," Lumine said. Rock felt the sheets taut between them. Lumine had tried to steal them while he'd been thinking.

"No. X is just tired," Rock said with a bit of annoyance for Lumine's internet diagnorsis psychologee.

"There's something wrong, but you can't think about it with words," Lumine explained. "I know your mind is advanced as we New Generation Reploids. Dr. Light programmed it with a gut, which you'd do well to follow. I'm worried, so you should be too."

"Are you worried, or are you just suspicious?"

"Worry, suspicion : he's your brother so we call it worry. The distinction is irrelevant."

"What are you worried about?"

"He seems different. His stutter doesn't bother you?"

"I stutter when I'm upset."

"That's a very complex programmed reaction like your blush. His stutter was mechanical. His speech banks were replaying the syllables and rewinding over them. As well, he was much more rude than usual, and quick to anger. It points to brain damage of the type Dr. Wily outlined in Bass."

"You think X is actually sick?" Rock turned over immediately in bed, shot through with actual worry. "We should get Daddy to look at him!"

"I'm certain the thought has already occurred to him," Lumine said of Dr. Light. "More worrying is the synthesis of dysfunctions between X and Zero. It doesn't seem healthy for X. He's not as in control of Heaven's army as he supposes himself. He couldn't properly direct the conversation as he usually does. He was nervous, evasive, and brash. X is a forthright yet thoughtful reploid. Something is wrong."

"Do you have a plan?" Rock asked hopefully, hand sneaking toward Lumine's shoulder to seek comfort in contact.

"No. The doctors and I will convene in the morning. I'm certain Dr. Wily is preoccupied with the same thoughts right now. That will give the robot masters some measure of relief."

"Huhm?" Rock's fingers touched Lumine's unarmoured shoulder. It was warm and smooth. He loved it.

"Doubtlessly they had prepared themselves to be assaulted with arguments from both sides tonight. I had placed their room between ours and the doctors so you would not have to hear your fathers argue."

"Lumine, no!" Rock grabbed Lumine's shoulder in offended shock. Lumine's slighter metal hand covered his.

"Oh, Rock, don't be so naïve."

"But, but—," Rock whined.

"I can hear them through the floor," Bass commented from the other room, made quieter by the wall and door intervening.

"Shut up and continue pretending to _not_ be listening," Lumine barked.

"Piss off," Bass yelled to get the final word, and Lumine could see the raised middle fingers doubtless aimed at him with his mind's eye. On the other side of the wall, Bass had chosen to put his thumbs between his fingers instead, but the meaning remained the same. It was delightfully normal.

"So you really don't want to complain about Bass?" Rock asked softly, voice taking on the childish fry that hid his age and tugged at hearts worldwide.

"I don't." Lumine brought Rock's hand over his abdomen, holding it warmly. "Maybe tomorrow morning. We can awaken the barbarian with the ruckus."

"But I won't be mad at him then."

"Of course you won't Rock. You're too adorable. Sleep."

"Good night, Lumine." Rock pulled himself flush with Lumine's back in forgiveness, absolved conscience willing to melt into his husband and cuddles. Lumine smiled and finally closed his eyes.

In the intervening suite where the robot masters were lodged, all of them had turned off their audio sensors except for Dive Man. He half-slept on the floor because of his bulk, while Wood Man and Trucker Joe shared the bed, Junk Man huddled in the couch under a Moomin shirt blanket, and Turbo Man in vehicle mode parked next to the door. The Cossack bot sympathised with the other robot masters' desire to get an undisturbed night of processor-cleaning sleep. But as a Cossack bot and the one among them with the best hearing, Dive Man took it on himself to brave the nocturnal noises of Neo Arcadia in case something untoward happened in the middle of the night. His foresight was unfortunately rewarded.

Wide awake in the leftmost room of the hall-corner, Light and Wily laid in bed next to each other, grumpily silent after arguing about Zero's programming. The checkerboard pattern of large yellow turtle shells and four teenage ninjas rose and fell slowly over their chests as their new reploid bodies faked breathing. Light was young again, a tower of a man with dark brown hair swirled over his head and chest, limbs built like tree trunks from helping out at the family farm and from moving Wily's dorm furniture. Wily was just as pretty as he'd been in their senior year. His delicate chest and high cheeks and familial aquiline nose flushed pink from agitation the same as they ever did when Tom would tease him at the campus tea room. Painted into the pseudoflesh silicone, his eyeliner wouldn't run any more, but the supplemental smoky black he'd applied for the court visit was smudged over his liquid grey eyes. 

With their bodies artificially restored to youth as newline reploids, it felt like their idiotic quarrel had never happened. Wily swore he'd work away the memories of his midlife crisis to reunite himself with Light forever, the way they were supposed to be : partners. Before Blues' nuclear core had burned Wily bald. Before the stress of late nights had forced Light grey. Before Wily had given up on fashion because their finances couldn't stand it any more, and he felt old, and his father the Graf von Schädelsvolkendach wouldn't support research into Pinocchio if the family gay boy wouldn't produce a real son. Before Light had let himself go after Blues left and broke his heart, and the replacement children, darling though they were, followed his mother's Midwest comfort food recipes. Before the press associated Wily with the failed military experiment and Light with the beloved household robots that Wily had built too. Before it all went to hell.

The window opened. Or rather its lock broke and then it slid out of the way in a way that was not supposed to happen. As soon as the intruder lifted himself out from under the blinds, all three men cursed at one another in varying states of extreme distress.

"Gentle Jesus!" Light's eyes were about to explode out of his head before he covered it in shame with teenage mutant ninja turtles, tunnelling under the sheets.

" _Scheiße!_ " Wily hissed at both Light for hiding, and Zero for suddenly being there.

"What the," Zero yelled before dialling his surprise down into the most forceful of whispers, "everliving hell?!"

" _Schweinhund, hau ab! Weswegen auch—_ "

Wily pointed at Zero angrily, not letting his orders to leave get in the way of a lecture since Zero was still standing there and still looking like an idiot and still not apologising or doing anything sensible but waving his hands back and forth. Zero was mostly waving his hands back and forth and making shushing noises, hoping for a break in angry but carefully enunciated Upper German to explain himself. The doctor's voice that time had dashed against the rocks was restored to its sea-deep smoothness just so it could now complain in a beautiful tone that contrasted with his anger. Realising by the second _verpiss_ that he'd have to be more proactive, Zero stepped forward and spoke.

"I'm trying to be secret. Don't wake anyone up," Zero repeated.

"It couldn't have waited until morning?" Wily finally asked, crossing his arms. Light was still hiding under the covers, so Wily stepped on his head to push him out.

"I didn't know you were asleep already. I couldn't hear over the wind shear."

"I built you with state of the art sensors and noise scrubbers, and you couldn't listen under some wind?"

"I wasn't listening very closely because naturally I did not expect Dr. Wily to be in the same room with, _the same bed with_ our enemy, Dr. Light."

Wily quickly shifted from outrage to a more calculating upset. "You don't remember a thing, do you?"

"I remember X—"

"Close the window. Be civilised." Wily motioned with his hand flapping to the side. Meanwhile Light crawled out the foot of the bed and dragged the top sheet with him. Not knowing what else to do in the face of this, Zero followed instructions and closed the window.

"I wasn't wrong, was I?" Zero asked, deciding to sit on the radiator. "You know there's something wrong with me. You figured it out while you were talking to X. And you know something's wrong with him, too."

"I have a good idea of what's wrong, yes," Wily responded. "With you, that is."

"There's something wrong with X?" Light asked.

"You made him. You didn't notice?" Wily asked rhetorically.

"He's under a lot of stress, but I don't think there's anything wrong. He needs to reset his vocaliser," Light reasoned.

" _Verdammt,_ you're the programmer, Tom. You can't tell this is a deeper issue?"

"I don't look for problems in my children."

"That's how things got this way, Tom."

"Al : don't," Light warned.

Wily looked at Light through irritated sadness, then sighed through his nose. He made fun of Light's optimism, he'd been hoping that starting over could erase decades of... this. It did on the Moon. But then on the Moon, they got to be together and there were no earthly distractions of their past failures.

"So. Zero, you're here for help?" Wily said.

"I— yes," Zero found it hard to admit. "I need help. X needs help. There's no one else to turn to. I can't fix it." Zero already looked small in Neo Arcadia's vest and short driven fashions. Now he looked even smaller. He almost looked like a child, for the first time in his life. Wily had created him to be an adult warrior from the outset ; he'd never had a childhood. He'd only had war. And X. Always, eternally, X, built into his brain as the siren call of his very existence.

"How much do you remember? I assume you know I made you."

"That wasn't easy to remember," Zero accused.

"I never made a secret of it. There's a W in your forehead."

"Yes, but I— you— after it all, Sigma— I couldn't remember. You were just a demon in my dreams!"

"Are you aware that this is the second time we've had this conversation?"

"I'm so sorry that my search for existence is annoying to you, Dr. Wily," Zero spat, crossing his arms.

Wily uncrossed his, trying to wipe any annoyance from his face. "No. No, Zero, it's not annoying at all. But I know you're not looking for sympathy. That's not who you are. So I'm sorry."

Zero stayed silently glowering, not voicing his burning thoughts.

"I apologise," Wily continued, "for installing the maverick virus in you. I only meant for it to act as a self-repair and robot RNA backup system because I knew that you would be constantly repairing and upgrading your systems. I hadn't intended for it to be contagious. I deeply regret starting the Maverick Wars."

Zero grunted. Wily really must have said all this before.

"I am so very sorry that I created you to destroy X, and that the Maverick Virus perpetuated that in others. But I'm not sorry that I made you to be capable of harming humans. I'm not sorry that I made you as human as I possibly could. I'm not..." Wily covered his mouth, considering his words. "I truly am happy and _proud_ that you fell in love with X. Don't ever regret that."

"You're way too late to start being my dad," Zero growled. "You're too late to apologise for all the death you caused. You can claim that you didn't mean any of it, but no one, no one anywhere, will ever believe you."

"It is what it is," Wily said plainly. "But tell me : does anyone know my name?"

"I do. X does."

"But no one else. The worst has happened and I've been forgotten. I'm a footnote, even in your history. But you see, I wasn't meant to last forever. You are."

Zero and Wily looked at each other. Zero didn't know why seeing Wily so young was disturbing. He didn't know if he'd ever get over the feelings of betrayal that the other man had created him to experience. He wanted to argue with every one of Wily's points, but he said each one as the culmination of a fight they'd had long, long ago. Zero couldn't remember that fight. That was the problem. The Wily that sat before him was the only human or reploid that could help him right now. Like him or not, Zero needed his help. He had to swallow his pride and his millions of accusations.

Wily spoke again: "What's the last thing you remember? Where is the hole in your memory? You should be aware of it."

Wily gauged Zero as his creation searched for the answer. Zero probably hadn't realised what he looked like. It wasn't his fault, really. Light had done it first in Rock and X. He doubted Zero would even want to think about what he and X looked like when they kissed, under the blonde hair. He'd be too horrified, so he chose blindness. The nose, the cheeks, the mouth, the chin, the eyes despite their hue : Wily was the only one looking in a mirror.

Taking his pants and then shirt from Light so he could live up to his own standard of civility, Wily almost chuckled at the thought of X installing a beard. Fate forbid it. But then, fate had never been kind. Zero and X had scraped and dragged happiness out of it. For that, Wily really was thankful that his plans had failed.

"There are two gaps in time," Zero said, laying out his internal research. "I have a smaller one between the ELF wars and awaking in Siberia. I was in night vision mode in the war, because of the atmospheric cover, and on full IR diagnostic. I know that two reploids and a very powerful ELF merged to take me down. I couldn't ID them. I came back online to... but I'll get to that later. From then, my logs are sequential. Before then, there's a very large memory gap between hunter base and the ELF wars. I can tell they're separate because of the time stamps. The last thing I remember from the hunters is Axl's birthday party. He chose his birthday based on when he joined the hunters, right? And then the last party was on the 22nd, and the one where he wanted to go to a water park, and then that night he tried pranking X, which was stupid. Actually, then I remember until the new year. It was pretty quiet. We all went drinking with Alia and the new girl, Layer. That's it. A cut off right before the clock resets."

"What year was that?"

"Ninety-nine, so..." Zero's mouth hung open and his eyes widened along with Light's. Everyone had realised what had happened. It was a perfectly clean century-wipe.

"You'd meet us again in 0-6," Light said, astounded.

"You don't even know why Rock and Bass are back or who Lumine even is, do you?" Wily asked, perhaps overly amused. "Then we all show up at once, today. Surprise."

"Well. I'd met Light before, in the capsules," Zero said.

"I was very happy to meet you, Zero," Light said with a fatherly smile. "I could not have asked for a better partner for X, or a better stepson. I am so proud of everything you've done."

"Everything?" Zero asked, memory full of blood and oil.

"Everything that matters," Wily said to put an end to the self-deprecation. He motioned Zero over to the bed after turning on a light. "Kneel and take off your scalp. I need to take a look inside."

"Do you need a pair of pliers, or a hairpin?" Light asked.

"You can fish my clip out of my coat, thanks," Wily said as Zero knelt before him and unlatched the clamps that kept his obscenely long hair in place.

"Sometimes I think you gave me that hair just so X would like it," Zero commented while laying his scalp carefully on the bed.

"If you want to know the truth, I thought it just looked nice," Wily said. "I cobbled together the rest of your armour for strength instead of æsthetics, so I had to give you something to compensate for the egregious lack of, mm, fabulosity. Thank you, Tom."

Taking his long clip from Light, Wily took a good look inside Zero's head. The situation was much as he'd hypothesised.

"Black Box #3 is missing," Wily said clinically, aiming his words more to Light than Zero.

"Someone took out a part of me?" Zero asked, trying not to be afraid for his bodily autonomy. Missing one of his programming blocks was quite different from missing an arm.

"They've wired in a new circuit board, with connectors to the treble boost system." Wily leant back, uncomfortable with the slapdash work. "I could run a diagnostic with a tablet. I'd have to shut down your motor routines in case it's battle oriented. Zero?"

"I want to know what it is," Zero assented. He felt incredibly vulnerable without the ability to act. Losing speech was nothing. Losing his arms was everything.

A few moments later, Wily had Zero cowed, and his tablet plugged into the interfering board to run it and log its processes. Wily activated the board. Signals shot out all over Zero's diagnostic interfaces, and his treble boost system primed itself, then ground angrily as mechanical parts found no peer. A copy of the board appeared switch by switch on Wily's tablet, and its attendant processor chip vomited up the attendant coding. Zero felt entirely sick from the dry run. Wily unplugged, scowling.

"Fanboys," Wily sneered. "He's made the comments and labelled functions in German, but he's obviously French."

"Isn't it a bit late to be nationalistic, Al?" Light gently chided.

"I am telling you the man is French," Wily said as if that truly mattered. "He left me a love letter. Disgusting."

"Who?"

"He calls himself Dr. Weil. Also he enjoys taunting people who run through his code as if it would be studied by future generations blind to his true genius. Simply: he's an arse." Wily noticed Zero's fans running high. Apologising offhandedly, he reactivated Zero's motor systems.

"I know about Dr. Weil," Zero said angrily.

"You could have said something," Wily said. "I don't like him any way. People who claim to be carrying on my legacy by aiming for world destruction are despicable. They don't understand me at all."

"What was he doing?" Light wondered. "Zero, if you know who he is, do you know what he did to you?"

"I know that he made a copy of me!" Zero said, standing quickly. "I've seen it too. It was there in Siberia when I woke up."

"A copy of you?" Wily asked himself, brows furrowing. "You're not supposed to be copyable. Zero, kneel right back down. If he broke my copy protection, I am going to find his corpse and murder it again!"

"You're not going to murder anyone, especially not a dead human scientist," Light admonished, although he understood Wily was being only half serious.

"Zero, I do need to take another look," Wily huffed.

Zero complied again. He hadn't even put his hair back on. This time, Wily did not disable any of Zero's systems before plugging into his central unit. Exploiting all of his own backdoors, Wily tramped through Zero's coding and registrars, looking for the sticky fingerprints of others. It felt incredibly strange for Zero. Thoughts would surface one after another and parts of him would spasm minutely. He felt that he had no control over his thoughts, even as he continued to think as himself in reaction to the waterfall of triggered processes and memories running inside him at his creator's beck. Wily swore under his breath, obviously finding things he didn't like. Involuntarily, Zero's throat and jaw began clicking like a cat seeing a bird while his life flashed before his eyes. Wily grumbled and tapped at his tablet.

"Sorry, I put a secret pathway through your lesser used systems. Try not to have fun," Wily commented.

"I'm not," Zero assured him.

Wily's agitation only grew as he continued poking around, running diagnostics, and reading logs. Finally the doctor disconnected from Zero with an angry tug. His hand went to Zero's shoulder and his harsh gaze communicated that he was not done.

"I want to take Weil's chip out, but he's made a terrible mess of you," Wily said.

"You'd better leave it in. He'd get angry if you removed it," Zero said.

"Assuming I care."

"You should. X will probably have you work with him tomorrow."

"You...!" Wily stilled his tongue. "Again, you could have said many of these things sooner, [Mein Loge-auf-eme-Segway](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8njyLeEfuQ&t=6m40s)."

"Ja, Vater," Zero responded automatically. "Don't call me Loki on a Segway!"

"I have to punish you somehow for technically failing to defeat X. You have a new safety switch, befit. All so, it seems you have been copied by yet another Frog who's left their tracks in your head."

"I feel the need to apologise to France for you," Light bemoaned.

"I don't hate all French people, only the ones who poke around in my work," Wily said, turning to address Zero. "The new one I found left clipping tags in for where to remove your memory, Zero. They used a commercially available file transfer system that required a few of my passwords, which they cracked the hard way. Then, my system hacked back into theirs, and I hope left a lovely 'gift.' The two, Weil and whoever else, had a bit of a fight in there, and the damn government left seals mucking up your data banks."

"X told me that I let myself be studied to produce a cure for the Maverick Virus. Sounds like something I'd do, I guess," Zero said while Wily closed up his head. "Something stupid because it just made things worse for X."

"It's a habit of yours," Wily commented.

"Yeah. I know. Will I ever get my memories back?"

"Something tells me copy has them, technically. You're missing one storage drive along with Black Box #3. Everything they thought constituted 'you' was probably backed up with it, ignoring how your memory storage works without redundant personality data. Lacking Black Box #2 which interregulates personality and memory data, the copy can't have access to your missing century."

"Am I still me?" Zero asked, pressing his hair back into place.

"You? Hm, that's hard to say. Most of your memories are still there. Your basic personality program is still in Black Box #1, regulated by #2's amalgamation of preferences from memory. You make the same logical decisions. What's missing is your higher speech functions. You're running them in a very roundabout way right now based on memory, much like a human. When Weil's chip kicks in, those functions grind to a halt to preserve RAM. More than that, you're missing your self diagnostics. There's no way you could have realised any of this about yourself, and there's no way for you to consciously control the Maverick Virus."

"I was able to do that?!"

"Yes, but then Sigma conked you on the head. You told me about that when we first met, and I took a look. I fixed the fissure and reprogrammed the subroutines. Not to toot my own horn, but you were overjoyed, since you stopped being contagious."

"It's true," Light said to back up Wily's explanation. "I tried to popularise the antivirus based on Al's fix, but the New Gen Reploids were all based on Cossack's OS, and immune anyway."

"And no one gave a damn about the Old Gens," Wily broke in.

"But X—" Zero wavered.

"Oh, he was always immune. I cribbed most of your programming from X's. The virus boosts his self repair and strength, just as in you, because it's interacting with the exact same write-code redundancy and power relay systems. If you consider a robot Maverick by presence of the virus, he'd have been Maverick from the moment you kissed him."

"So he was never in danger..." Zero trailed off, feeling pain from the relief in his heart. He still managed to crack a smile. "You lazy bastard."

Wily laid back on the bed, unaffected by the jibe. "Dr. Light is equally lazy, basing X off of my engineering."

"I recognise great work," Light gave a compliment to defend himself, sitting down as well.

"Naturally. You're bad at engineering and I'm not so good at programming. We work better together." Wily fiddled around with his tablet, highlighting code for deletion. "Imagine what we could have done if we'd actually coöperated on the first reploids. It would have been art, Thomas." Wily pointed at Light, eyebrows raised. Light smiled then lay on his back, tired from the late hour and human habit.

"They'd be brothers then, and couldn't have fallen in love," Light said.

"How tragic. So sad." Wily looked up from his screen to Zero. "Aren't you glad I made you to defeat X instead? It all worked out."

"What are you doing?" Zero asked.

"I'm cleaning up your code in here," Wily said, "then I'll package the fixes as a sort of retroviral patch to delete and then fix all of the godawful changes they made to you. It's the best I can do until you get your hands on your missing Black Box."

"You won't try to nullify Dr. Weil's chip, will you?"

"I have a mind to. Talk me out of it."

"He thinks he can control me with it, but he's wrong. He's a fool."

"I'll agree there," Wily murmured.

"The chip lets me integrate with the Omega Armour. I know that it's destructive. I've heard the rumours, and I know what the museums say. But I need it to protect X. My copy almost killed me when I was last in it. Naked, I couldn't do anything. X is sick. He needs protection until you can fix him, Dr. Light." Zero implored both doctors.

"Is he sick, Zero?" Light asked, sitting up to face Zero with definite concern. "How sick?"

"He's..." Zero shook his head. His indestructible hair hit the bed in a quick drumbeat. He scowled. "He's not happy. It's different from when he's disappointed in humans. He's so unhappy, he's acting mean to people who want to help him. He does everything Dr. Weil asks him to, but I don't see Dr. Weil doing anything to help him! Dr. Weil said he fixed him, but he looks sicker than ever."

"Fixed him?" Light was appalled at the implications.

"Heaven's Army killed him! Leviathan and Harpuia told me what happened. They don't trust me, but they wouldn't hide the truth from me. Heaven's Army killed X ; put him out of commission. Everyone thought he was dead and it almost destroyed Neo Arcadia! Dr. Weil repaired his body, but he still looks terrible under his clothes. And he's not acting right. Sometimes, I look at him and I don't see X. He seems empty, like a vase, and Weil is, uh, filling him." Zero struggled with the analogy using his hands, but growled at the end of unpoetic words. "I can't tell X I want the old him back. He doesn't think anything's wrong. Everything's really crap outside any way. I see it every time I leave to kill terrorists."

Zero looked at Light, suddenly fearful. "Please don't tell him I kill them."

"Well, do you kill them, or do you liberate their Integrated Circuit for the Recycling Program?" Wily suggested.

"I don't give a damn about them. I leave them on the ground," Zero said without remorse.

"You have to go back and save their IC chips, Zero," Light ordered behind pleading eyes. "They deserve a chance at rehabilitation. They can't all be evil."

"They hurt X!" Zero retorted. "They hurt humans."

"Go find them, Zero," Light ordered again, more certain in his words. "While you bring them back, Wily and I will find X inside himself. We'll repair him, even if he complains. I need my boy to be happy. And he can't be happy if you're a murderer."

"He already knows I am."

"You weren't responsible for those deaths, Zero," Light said. He knew Zero was thinking of his earliest actions once awoken. "You're both fundamentally good. You can't forget that."

"I can't be good if I can't protect X. I'm supposed to save the world in the Omega Armour, he says, but I can't even make him happy." Zero kicked at the bed's mattress. Its aged springs creaked angrily.

Wily put down his tablet with the code unfinished and stood. Zero never expected the hug from the replication of the small man who made him. He would have expected Light. But Wily's arms were around him, and the warmth from his energy reactor was seeping out between them.

"All of my sons are stupid," Wily said into Zero's chest, "but you don't give up."

"Your sons?" Zero could hardly believe the word coming from the man who, up until then, had haunted his dreams as a shadow of his own ill works.

"Of course." Wily pulled his face out of Zero's vest, looking up at his creation. His hands drifted to the cheeks he's carefully sculpted, holding them with tender reverence. "Dr. Light made a perfect son, and so did I. I know you don't remember it, but you can ask the Robot Masters tomorrow. Just how much I love all of you."

Wily patted Zero's cheeks. Then the patting ended with a light almost-slap. "I'll load your updated code in the morning. Now go back to X and don't tell anyone about my good side. He needs you tonight, doesn't he?"

"He doesn't want to see me. In his room. With Dr. Weil." Bitterly, Zero walked back to the window. "I'm supposed to be on mission again."

"Don't go," Light said. Zero heard the bed creak under Light as his bulk moved across it. The doctor's large feet made soft thuds on the floor. A wide hand was then on Zero's back. "Don't fight anyone tonight. Just stay with us, Zero."

"I can't," Zero hissed.

"I'll pull out the couch bed," Light decided. His hand left Zero's back, then he pounded back into the far room. Zero turned in time to see his pyjama stripes round the corner.

"You'll need to defragment your drives before we re-install anyway," Wily said. With his knees up at his chest and the tablet balanced in his lap, he was back at work on restoring Zero's code. "I wouldn't let you go for that reason."

In the living room, the pull out bed thunked down. Zero still wanted to leave so he could pretend he was helping X again by destroying another pocket of the rebellion. X loved that. The new X loved it. The old X would have hated it.

"The bed is ready," Light called as he reëntered the bedroom.

Wily looked at Zero with challenging steel-blue eyes. Zero's were tarry black and tired. Zero turned from the window and his hair caught the slightest of breezes to fan out behind him. He unzipped his undersuit and stuck his z-saber inside.

"Thank you, Dr. Light," Zero said. As he passed by the doctor, he threw his shorts and vest into a nearby chair.

"Good night, my segway boy," Wily said in English before turning out the light.

Zero paused in the pentagonal archway between their rooms. He didn't remember learning not to hate Wily. Maybe he had intuition, or maybe he had a bit of X buried inside his processor that was nagging him. Either way...

"Good night, Father."


	3. Who hie to celebrate His Throne with warbled hymns

Knocking ripped through Rock's morning slumber. The old robot stumbled out of bed and to the door, passing Bass who was fitfully wrestling with his blanket on the way. He put on a smile for whoever had come to the door. The sun had not yet risen, but he would use his sunny disposition instead.

Standing in the hall's dim blue light, two distinguished looking reploids held none of Rock's enthusiasm. The taller of the pair was Harpuia of the four generals whom Rock had met before. His delicate face unmistakably combined X's youthful heart shaped jaw with Zero's almond eyes. Outfitted for battle as ever in his green X-vest, he looked over to the reploid beside him. Rock recognised the shorter visitor's white judge robes with golden tree insignia, but had only heard of the Gentle Judges and submitted paperwork to their legal appeals process. He'd never before met any of them. The one standing there looked unhappy to be present, but Rock decided to focus on their pretty headdress that reminded him of a Scolipede.

"Good morning, Rock," Harpuia said, "Lord X requests your presence for breakfast."

"Good morning, Harpuia. That's very nice. Thank you," Rock said genuinely. Perhaps a good night's sleep had cleared X's mind so they could have a happy meal together to replenish their energy cells. "When will that be?"

"In half an hour. But before then, my associate has brought to my attention some legal documents we need to discuss. May we enter?"

"Oh, of course." Rock ushered them in with an embarrassed blush. He thought he'd completed every document to the tiniest jot.

As soon as the door closed, the tinier judge shot the suite full of a web of electrical waves. Bass yelled from the couch. Lumine yelled from the bed. Rock kept himself from crying out by biting the inside of his lip.

"What the hell was that for?!" Bass spat.

"We needed to disable any possible eavesdropping," Harpuia said. "We shorted all power on this floor and sent out a disabling wave for all known micromechs."

"I hacked the security system last night. You needn't've." Lumine spoke as he slowly padded into the living room, tiny feet bare and cold on the white tile floor. The blanket trailed after him, floating with the soft tiredness of his fluttering lavender eyelashes.

"Wow, this is very rude," Rock said. This wasn't a good beginning to the morning, and he hated to think of all the extra work that the maintenance mets would have to do.

"My apologies, Lord Rock," the Gentle Judge said with a masculine voice as smooth as cream. Bringing his cloak up to his heart, he bowed. "I am loathe to make such a brusque entrance, but Harpuia assured me that this utmost secrecy was required. If I had chosen, we would have made a proper acquaintance."

Rock and Lumine bowed in response. "I don't like the idea of hiding," Rock said with an annoyed burr, "but it is a pleasure to meet you, sir. I think you know me, Rock Light. This is my husband, Lumine, Director of the Moon."

"Oh my God, really?" Bass complained about the entire overly polite situation from the couch, held back only by sloth and a warm blanket.

"That's Bass, my other husband," Rock explained. "He's not punching you so please, please accept that as the best case scenario."

"I will when the sun comes up," Bass promised, then covered his head. He shut off his audio sensors. He could tell family drama was going to happen, and wanted to sleep instead. When he woke up, he'd ask Rock for centipede-horns-zapsalot's name, then track him down and beat him up. Harpuia was already on his list.

"A pleasure to meet you all finally. I am Schilt of the Gentle Judges, at your ever humble service." The reploid in white finally introduced himself, making sure to capture Rock's gaze with his own. The oldest robot's eyes were so soft that it startled him to his power core. To be so taken aback was new for him, such that he felt then at a loss for words. Was it the ghost of his programming past recognising a predecessor for all reploid lines? Or was he recognising beauty in the man, of body and soul perfectly synthesized? Or was it love at first sight? That would be a foolish mistake seeing as Rock had just introduced him to two husbands. Perhaps three in the future? Oh no, Schilt, no, he admonished himself. Such a fleeting fascination must be forgotten!

"I wish that we could have met the judges sooner," Lumine said pleasantly, breaking through Schilt's momentary reverie.

"Oh, yeah, you're pen pals with one of them, aren't you?" Rock said while pointing at the invisible lightbulb over his head.

"He works in the judicial sector," Lumine clarified. "In any case, what has prompted this secrecy, Harpuia?"

"Master X is unwell, and the good doctor is to blame," Harpuia spat. "We thought he was gone. Then he returns like this. I was so glad to see him back. We all wanted nothing more. But this thing pretending to be X can't be him. He admonished me; demoted me! He disrespected all of the four generals. He doesn't love us."

"Wait, what do you mean he was gone?" Rock asked anxiously.

"I sent you the information," Harpuia said.

"But I didn't hear anything. What happened?"

"Heaven's Army attacked Neo Arcadia," Lumine explained, laying a slim hand on Rock's shoulder. The dark purple limb stuck awkwardly out of the comforter like a dead branch. "X went missing. The communiqué came secretly. I didn't want to upset you."

Rock wrenched his shoulder angrily out of Lumine's fingers. "You should have told me! We could have gone to look for him! You would have helped too, wouldn't you, Harpuia? And Phantom?"

"Phantom is dead," Harpuia said simply. "We searched for X. We tried tracking his signal. It couldn't be found using even the most sensitive equipment. We used every means necessary."

"Daddy— Dr. Light could have found him!" Rock insisted. "If he's sick, it could have happened, something bad happened to him, and if I'd found him sooner, he'd be okay."

"I was in favour of requesting aid sooner," Schilt said to ingratiate himself and to calm the tone of the room, "but a general vote from the judges and the people's parliament did not want to involve the Moon."

"But..." Rock swallowed his words. He couldn't do anything then. He stepped further away from Lumine and from the visitors, buting his lower lip openly. "What can we do now? Is he really sick?"

"He is," Harpuia affirmed. "But Dr. Weil won't allow Dr. Light to examine him. I am sure of it. X intends for them to collaborate on the energy shortage and the Omega armour. Weil wants to apply X's power to it. He knows only Dr. Light is capable or replicating those systems fully."

"What's the Omega— wait, didn't X and Zero fight against it?"

"It is now in Neo Arcadia's possession. Normally, this would be a good thing. But I have the horrible feeling that Weil wants to repeat history."

"It's only logical to repeat a trick if it works," Schilt added. "If Dr. Weil insists that only Zero using the Omega armour could stop Heaven's Army, then he may use that as an excuse for Omega to lead the world. His mad palaver about a messiah!"

"With Weil controlling both Zero and X fully," Harpuia concluded. "He already has them under his spell. It's happening, but we can't figure out how."

"My colleague Deathtanz has reason to believe that Dr. Weil has altered the programming in the latest round of recycled citizens, based on their behaviour alone —and his dissections." Shilt showed a quirk of disgust at the thought of the other judge peering into the brains of the dead. Yet he knew it was the executioner's mien.

"That's horrible!" Rock said, body shaking from the morning cold and his own heart. "This is all horrible. What can I do?"

"We need to defeat Heaven's Army ourselves," Harpuia concluded. "But I can't send Bass after them. They have many reploid non-combatants living in their bases. As far gone as X is, he agrees with me that we cannot bomb the base."

"You know where it is?" Rock asked.

"I know the location of the development lab that deploys the Zero copy," Harpuia admitted, looking to the side to cover a flash of shame. Knowing the location of the base, he should have been the one to infiltrate it and destroy the copy Zero. He'd failed. Worse, he'd come to respect the copy. He'd come to respect Ciel. Because Master X was gone, he'd fallen so low, reduced to respect out of desperation. "The leader of Heaven's Army, Ciel, works there. She has developed a new energy system. She offered to share it. X refuses to implement it or even parlay with her. As much as I despise the terrorists, the world needs that technology. I need you or Lumine to speak with Ciel. If you bring back the energy technology to X, he can't refuse you as a third party."

"A very astute political solution," Lumine said. "Rock, I think you should talk with her. You're practically human."

"I'm an old robot," Rock said faster than he could think to stop himself. The bitter words stung Lumine's eyes.

"You're a better negotiator than I am," Lumine said emptily. "That is what we need in order to help the Earth."

"You're right," Rock said. His hand trembled to touch Lumine, but there were too many footsteps between them. He was sorry for being upset. "I'll do it, Harpuia," Rock promised.

"We will still need Bass," Harpuia said. "Terrorists continually attack our recycling centres and resource processing centres. If he patrols these points, he may intercept the Zero copy."

"Intercept?" Lumine asked archly. "Kill?"

"If he can't negotiate. It may be necessary. But copy Zero believes himself to be Zero. He will talk."

"But Bass won't talk," Rock groused.

"Then, I will shadow him," Lumine said. "With two people to protect your resource centres, we can ensure wider coverage and interception."

"I'd hate to waste your political trip in such a way," Schilt said.

"But it is necessary," Harpuia decided.

"What if X wants us to do something else?" Rock asked.

"Then that can't be avoided. But you must find a way to leave on these missions, for the good of Neo Arcadia. Please," Harpuia implored, stepping forward.

"It sounds like a coup to me," Lumine commented, smiling slightly as he worked out the implications.

"Master X is the rightful ruler of Neo Arcadia, but only in his right mind," Harpuia growled like far off thunder. "Whatever X is ruling now is just a puppet to Weil. It might be programming. It might be his own choice. No matter: it's not the X I remember."

"Dr. Weil has influenced the Gentle Judges as well," Schilt explained, his cloak falling off of his arm like water as he gestured to the side. "We can't be sure how many of them support Weil and how many support, ah, what we could call the opposition."

"It really is a coup," Rock whispered.

"It's an investigation," Harpuia corrected.

"Investigation," Lumine parroted. "Fine. A judicial investigation is perfectly legitimate by Neo Arcadian law. If Schilt can find the requisite two supporting judges, we could even file paperwork post-facto to legitimise ourselves. If we succeed."

"You're not thinking of doing this!" Rock said, aghast, then realised he didn't quite know why he was upset, other than nothing about this feeling right. "What is this?"

"We are looking into ways to help X and Neo Arcadia as allies from the sovereign Moon," Lumine said with excessive ease.

"But if X can't be helped, what do we do?"

"Rock, you're the eternal optimist. How can you give up on X? Of course we'll find a way to help him. Won't you?"

"Lumine, you'd hurt someone if you thought it would help. I know it. And I don't want you hurting X. You've got to promise me, he won't get hurt! I don't care about politics and states, but please don't let my little brother get hurt!"

"We came here to help Neo Arcadia and X. That's the only thing I want to do. Don't you trust me?"

"I always did, but—" Rock bowed his head, then shuffled backward away from Lumine's leer. Things had gotten this bad because Lumine hadn't trusted _him_. He'd been treated like a kid again, by his husband. That hurt too much. He wasn't a kid. He was an adult who had saved the world multiple times by himself. He'd have to do it again. "We have to go see X. He's expecting us. Harpuia, I will go to see you as soon as possible so I can go to the terrorist base to get the energy research. Schilt, Lumine and Bass will help you any way they can, I'm sure. I'll do my part. Now I have to get dressed. Please excuse me, your honours." Rock gave a formal bow, then walked stiffly into the bedroom closet and closed it behind himself.

Two doors down, a knock quietly shook the doctors' door. Zero awoke and dashed out of the living room immediately, hair bushy with wariness. He shook Wily's arm until his creator awoke. Wily's artificial eyes snapped open immediately, but it took his processors a while to boot up his uploaded human self.

"What is it?" Wily asked groggily in German, pushing on Light's shoulder until the other was forced to wake up too.

"There's someone at the door," Zero answered in German.

"God, what time is it?"

"Seven forty-three."

"Ach, we have breakfast at eight and I need to get ready. God, there's not enough time. Thank you, Zero." Wily pushed on Zero's chest while he rose from his pillow. His fingers went straight to his brownish red hair, brushing it out absentmindedly.

"There is someone at the door," Zero said more urgently.

"Illgetit," Light slurred, hearing the second round of rapping.

"No, Tom, I'll get it," Wily said to Light, finally switching to English. He began walking to the door, barefoot and clothed only in his pyjama shirt. "Get dressed."

"I'm not supposed to be in here," Zero said to Light before rushing into the tiny closet. Once he closed the door, he brought out the hilt of his z-saber, ready.

Wily opened the door to see Trucker Joe on the other side.

"I suppose I'm lucky you didn't come in without warning," Wily commented to the helmeted old robot.

"There's been a change of plans," Trucker Joe said, his smooth voice crawling through the room like a deep sea echo.

"Yes, Zero is inside our room." Wily stifled a yawn.

In the closet, Zero stiffened. But he didn't exit.

"Rock had guests. They're planning a governmental coup. You should check in with him and the moon goblin before breakfast."

"Oh, are we invading Earth?" The young tone of the old doctor's voice was entirely too comfortable with the prospect, and his glinting eyes agreed with the idea. "I didn't even bring any royal clothes— raiment."

Trucker Joe chuffed out a laugh like an idling Harley. "I think Harpuia's going to be king. He's who most of the little bots look up to, anyway. I talked with a few of the human workers too. Figured I'd give you my report now, since I came over here to tell you about the coup and all. So the dock workers..."

"I need to get ready." Wily cut Trucker Joe off.

"You can listen while you put on makeup."

"Clothes," the doctor corrected.

"I've seen you naked." The old robot crossed his arms while stepping into the room fully. The door closed on the trailing end of his scarf. He swatted at the opening console and tugged the cloth back the flash of a canary. He stuffed the scarf further into his forest green work suit trimmed by black leather. Already the fine wool had a stain on it courtesy of the underbelly of Neo Arcadia. "You're the one who wanted me to slip on with the 'common people' to measure the actual mood of this place. So here's that report you wanted, doc."

Wily sighed as he headed for the sink to wash his shadow-smeared face. There was no winning this. He assented, "Fine..."

Light opened up the closet to get his day clothes, finding Zero frozen uncomfortably in place. He felt sorry for the reploid who looked so tiny when crouched down in readiness.

"You can come out now," Light said kindly.

Zero raised a finger to his lips, black eyes widening.

Light shook his fuzzy head. It was like dealing with a darling child. "All right. I need my suit though." With this warning, he reached over Zero's head to pull out his red and white Neo Arcadian gear. "I'm going to open the window to let in some fresh morning air. But I need to get changed," he said loudly before closing the door between bedroom and public space. He turned to Zero, then winked.

Zero blushed for a second, but shot out the window the moment Light got it open. The doctor barely heard the "thank you" whispered on the wind. Thank goodness for reploid hearing, he thought with an even wider smile.

"...That's one heck of a theory," Trucker Joe said, watching Wily push on his gloves one finger at a time. One silver wrist attachment clicked. "Have you told Doctor Light?"

"Rock calls him 'daddy,' you know," Wily commented suggestively.

"I'm not Rock."

"Right," Wily agreed to avoid an old argument. "No, I have not. He's not even ready to accept that something is wrong."

"So you want me to fix your mistake, right?"

"I don't see how any of this is my fault," Wily shot back, glaring daggers into the mirror while the finished shaping his bangs into a W.

"It all comes back to the maverick virus."

"Oh, please." Wily's cape huffed for him when he turned sharply to face the Trucker Joe, eyebrows arched in dissatisfaction over ice blue eyes. The old robot's monolithic red eye met him implacably.

"And then there's Dr. Weil. You said his little love letters dedicate whatever he's done to Zero to you. Because you tried to take over the world, multiple times."

"Also not my fault," Wily snapped. "I told Zero. Anyone who conquers to uphold my legacy is an imperceptive fool. As if I'd want any one else to get the credit for my dream! What I want you to do is to destroy him. Academically humiliate him first, if at all possible, crush him in the court of public opinion, and then tear his life to pieces for denigrating my work." Wily took a quick but calming breath. "But that would be very uncourteous of me."

"Yeah, that would be very un-Wily."

"Sometimes I regret teaching you sarcasm, Blues."

Half an hour late, the entire Light and Wily family finally arrived for breakfast with X. Luckily, X didn't seem to mind. His attention was fully on Zero, engrossed in conveying information. The worried twitches of Zero's mouth coïncided with each time X said "Dr. Weil" in an all to reverent tone. Still, in between sentences, Zero nodded and smiled, and eventually placed his hand over X's. X stuttered horribly from shock when he realised the gesture was spurred by Zero's desire to show off in front of the newly arrived guests. Zero loved that, even if it made the horrible mechanical stutter worse, because such blushing shame between quickly hooded eyes and drawn in shoulders was the most _X_ thing X had done all week.

Across the table, Dr. Weil hated it. His gaze that roamed over the other doctors was not welcoming. Wily glared back immediately, but Light put on his best grin to bear it. No reason to alienate the man X had asked him to work with. Wood Man tried to say hello to everyone present, but was met with silence. The breakfast was gearing up to be fabulous already.

Human-ish mechaniloids in neat white and navy uniforms came out with the breakfast proper. Each had three wheeled legs, to simple but agile gripper arms, and a face comprised of a rounded rectangle with one red sensor eye. Walking in front of them was the first human that anyone in the lunar party had seen in person. An elderly woman in a matching uniform with a chef's hat splayed out like a triangular tiara came to the table to put a bowl of hot corn grits in front of Dr. Weil. The mechaniloids followed with bowls for the others at the table into which they poured liquid stabilised energy from a decanter. The service ended with a spoon for each diner. Everyone thanked the servers, save Weil who immediately began eating.

Rock couldn't help but look at Weil as he ate. It was hard for him to place the craggy old man as a human instead of a moving sculpture. He hadn't spoken a word, but looked ready to explode. His whole body was supported by machines that piled onto his wheelchair like a hermit crab's decorated shell. Pistons rose and fell for his breath. A servo visibly running the length of his sleeve helped him lift his spoon. Yet he ate. He was still human.

Regarding his bowl of green energy, Rock felt disappointment and then guilt. He was used to supplementing his pure energy with the organic fuels grown on the moon, actual food. Light had built him to interact with food even when he was in his old robot body, not the newest reploid model. He was used to experiencing a sort of false hunger, rather a food-hope, from his biofuel burner. He'd have to ignore it. People here on Earth were starving. He felt nothing but shame for expecting the luxury of something like breakfast cake when those resources should and would go to humans who required food to survive. Rock decided to be very grateful for the liquid energy he was given, and began to sip it in spoonfuls.

Bass had just downed the entire bowl by holding it up to his mouth. He sat with arms crossed, tapping his foot on the floor. Rock could feel a storm of irritation building in the other diners, so he put a hand on Bass' shoulder and shushed him.

"What?" Bass asked loudly.

"You're tapping your foot," Rock said. This wouldn't work against Bass' tapping, so Rock quickly searched for something else to soothe over the meal. "Do you want to go back to the room?"

"I wanna go be useful," Bass said, leaning over the table so he could glare at Lumine. "You know, according to your plan."

"Bass wants to patrol the resource processing centres in case Heaven's Army comes to attack them," Lumine explained in half-truth. "It may be impudent of me, since you haven't authorised this action, X, but I suggest we let him."

"It's true that we need the extra protection," X said warily. "But can he identify Heaven's Army, and fight only them?"

"I just want to fight the copy Zero," Bass admitted bluntly.

X stiffened, then placed down his spoon. He shared a shocked look with Zero. "How do you know about the other Zero?"

"You were trying to keep him secret?" Bass snorted in his own bluff. He wasn't an idiot. He wanted to start a fight, not a political state-secret situation. So he would imply that everyone was taking about it and it wasn't a secret at all.

"I told him," Zero said.

Bass boggled. Then he got angry. So much for him trying to cover for his little brother! And it wasn't even true. Bass heard it from Wily when the moon unit had gotten together to compare notes. Zero hadn't been there.

"Why did you do that?" X asked without upset or judgement. Apparently, Zero could do no wrong when it came to this state secret.

"I want to defeat the copy myself, but if Bass does it instead, that's just as good for Neo Arcadia. It doesn't matter who defeats Heaven's Army. I shouldn't let pride get in my way."

"Zero, that's— that's very good of you." X grabbed onto Zero's upper arm, eyes wide and watery.

"If we may discuss business," Lumine interrupted as if he were continuing a thought, "I believe that the Robot Masters can complete their missions just as we agreed. You've found Zero, so our secret side mission is moot," Lumine paused and smiled to play off the phrase as a tiny joke, "but I believe Earth still needs our aid. Turbo Man says that our supplies are already in the distribution system."

"That's correct," X affirmed. "Our transporter operators can direct the Robot Masters to where they're needed. You all may leave for the field whenever you wish. I don't need any of you standing around just for ceremony. Please help my people." Z stood, placing a hand over his heart and looking each Robot Master in the eye. "And thank you, th-thank you all for coming. The earth needs the moon." X sat back down, feeling heavy. 

Lumine regarded him kindly. X was broken, but holding his parts together. Lumine could see the cracks in the reploid he had grown to admire, and felt the dark water of the room seep into him out of Weil's oozing presence. He didn't belong. He was entirely incongruous at the breakfast, from what he was eating to his hidden motives. That man had to go.

"That leaves what to do with those of us who are useless hangers on," Lumine said.

"We're not useless," Rock muttered between spoonfuls.

"I'd like to visit a penpal of mine in the judicial sector. He's currently stationed in Old Residential. Failing that, I can of course help any robot master's operation."

"The visit won't take long?" X inquired.

"A few hours at most."

"I don't see why you can't, then. You've helped judicial with penning our import and housing regulation laws before. Do you have any amendments?"

"No, this is a purely social visit." Lumine smiled in such a genuine way that even Rock was taken aback. Noticing this, Lumine turned the smile to his husband. "Would you like to accompany me? It would do for both of us to go out for a short while before we aid in the salvage efforts."

Rock was too busy running over Lumine's correspondence habit to answer quickly. He'd been writing to people on Earth, but surely Lumine wasn't carrying on with anyone? He wasn't a very social type. Polite to a fault, yes, but not someone who went out of his way to interact with others unless he had something to get out of it. Yet Rock couldn't sense any deceit in Lumine's request to X. It was a social visit with some mystery Earth friend. Rock didn't know who it was. He'd never inquired about to whom Lumine wrote, because he always assumed it was business, because it almost always was. But now— now Lumine was being a tiny bit deceitful in his last sentence, offering a way for Rock to leave the palace so he could find the leader of Heaven's Army. Right. That mission as important.

"I'd love to go with you and meet that penpal," Rock said, licking his lips to cover up the transition to a smile, and his faint hint of passive aggression. "Then we'll go right back to Junk Man."

"Naturally," Lumine agreed, not missing a beat before he sipped at his liquid energy. "Turbo Man can help Wood Man deliver his animals. So that leaves the doctors."

"Dr. Light is going to aid Dr. Weil," X said confidently.

"In what, we don't know," Dr. Wily said just loud enough to be heard over the clicking of spoons.

"Baby Elves," Dr. Weil croaked. The attention of the room immediately focused on the thin rasp coming from his pockmarked throat. His black eyes looked out unkindly from under bags of skin. He really wasn't putting any effort into looking inviting, not even in the manner he held himself. But then, a genius didn't need to be friendly. Dr. Weil began backing away from the table in his cumbrous wheelchair. "They are the key to the Dark Elf and a solution to the energy crisis. If we can find them, and take them apart. Pry their secrets out of them."

"I'm more than happy to help with the energy crisis, and these elves," Light said uncertainly, "but my work in Electronic Life Forms was preliminary. If you need to decompile their code, wouldn't it be best to find their creator?"

"Their creator is the leader of Heaven's Army," Weil ground out as his chair scraped past Light. "We can't expect anything from her. You and I, Light, we are men. We are dependable and great. Ours will be the names that live on. Light, and Weil."

When Weil's eyes met Wily's, it felt as if a stray spark could fill the room with fire. Wily understood in that second that he did not have a swooning fanboy, or a serial killer's imitator. He had an usurper.

Wily sneered openly. He would destroy Weil and crush each red blood cell into the floor. He would put the man's work and memories into a pit and laugh as they burned. He was a reploid now. He had forever to wait for Weil's insultingly simple machines to fail. Then Wily would wipe him and all of his accomplishments from history, even the Elf Wars, and Wily would still be on the moon, still known, and still loved. Wily would win and Weil would lose.

Yet all Wily could consciously think was "I bet his real name is Fernand or something hideously French like that."

"I'm terribly flattered, Dr. Weil," Light said, unaware of Wily's seething displeasure. "But I'm just happy to help Earth. If we solve the energy crisis, then humans and robots can finally live together in harmony."

"Oh yes, yes they certainly shall," Weil agreed. Then he revealed his laugh, dry and empty as a corn husk.

"I'm glad we agree on what's important, then," Light said. He was beginning to worry that Weil might actually be in it for the fame, not the peace. Still, he was intent on working as hard as he could to make peace a reality. It couldn't be a dream. He wouldn't allow it to be. He was a reploid now. He had forever to cultivate and then protect love and happiness between humanity, reploids, and the earth.

"But what will that other doctor do?" Weil asked with open goading.

"I want to make sure that my son, Zero, is functioning properly. He's been gone for so long, he deserves a proper diagnostic from his creator, don't you think?" Wily thinned his bronze-shimmer eyes as he sent out his own conversational feelers.

Weil growled. "That won't be needed. I took care of his repairs myself. You don't need to look inside him." Realising how incriminating that sounded, Weil added, "How well he's functioning should speak for me. He's flawless, and stronger than before."

"I'd still like to take a look. I'm his father." Wily played up the innocence of his request, looking straight to X and Zero at the end of the table.

"There's nothing wrong with Zero," X said. "Dr. Weil did a wonderful job. And he says that tampering with Zero's systems at this point in his Omega Armour integration would be very harmful. Right, Doctor?"

"Yes, X, that is exactly right," Weil said smugly. "It's not a problem with anyone's programming. It's a matter of his bodily integrity while his systems calibrate his entire physical frame. He can still fight, but his head can't be touched. You know what would happen if you interrupted his calibration thanks to your Treble Boost systems, don't you, Albert?"

Wily frowned deeply. Weil had no right to use his first name. "I do. He'd become catatonic and then wipe his databanks. It was a safety protocol I added so that his attack programming couldn't fall into enemy hands. To be controlled by the enemy through those systems: that would be catastrophic. Especially for X." Wily inclined his head to his son in law.

"So you underst-stand why we c-can't open him up?" X said, relief starting to enter his voice.

"Oh, yes, X, put yourself at ease," Wily assured.

"I'm s-sure you can look at Zero afterwards," X offered.

"Only if he's feeling unwell, I suppose," Wily said gamely. "Parents do have to learn to let go."

"That's very true," Light said, laying a hand on Wily's caped shoulder. "Even if it's the hardest part. Since Dr. Weil and I are both done eating, we should get to work. Would you mind, X? The sooner we solve the energy problem, and save Earth, the sooner we can all take time off as a family."

"Of course," X nodded. "Call if you need me."

"Don't worry about me, X," Light said, taking a long and satisfied look at his son who was still sitting properly at the table, half-filled spoon in hand. He'd missed so many breakfasts like this. Light stood, pecked Wily on the cheek, then walked to Weil's side. "I will follow you to your lab, Dr. Weil. If that is where we're going?"

"Tom, you sound so formal. Call me Alphonse," Weil responded as he began to wheel away to the hall.

"Alphonse," Wily parroted through a high-pitched nasal sneer. " _Ohhonhonhon, oui, je m'apelle Alphonse._ Gott im Himmel."

"You shouldn't mumble so loudly if you don't want people to hear you," Zero warned.

"I'm not working with him. I can mumble as loud as I want," Wily retorted. "I don't care if he hates me."

"Don't _make_ enemies, Papa," Rock joined Zero in disappointed worrying.

"Well, I'm going to join Dive Man in his salvage work," Wily announced. "I can operate an underwater vehicle as well as anyone."

"You'll be under the ocean?" X asked, inferring that Wily chose a job as far away from others as he could, but needing confirmation.

"Yes, and out of contact range. Just how I'd like it. I'll rejoin you all at the dock at the end of the day. Until then." Wily stood, searched at his collar for a napkin that wasn't there to throw down, then grabbed at his hip in irritation.

"You're leaving?" Dive man spoke up, a bit alarmed. "I'm not finished fuelling."

"Go ahead and finish, Dive Man. Zero can lead me to the docks."

"I know where they are," Rock volunteered. "I can show you down before joining Lumine."

"I'd like Zero to accompany me," Wily said.

"You're not goi-i-ing to look in his-s head," X said.

"X, no," Wily said with an offended flick of his wrist over his heart. "I'm not going to hurt Zero. I want to talk with my son."

"Uhhuh," X grunted, unconvinced.

"He's not going to hurt me, X," Zero assured X, running his fingers around the bottom of the reploid's blue helmet, right where a few hairs peeked out. "I want to talk to him too." Zero's hand ended up under X's chin, ever so slowly moving. X sighed, but even the soft sound was caught up in the warble of his hiccupping vocal systems.

"I trust you, Zero."

"Thank you, X." Zero kissed the top of X's head. "I'll find you later."

"A-actually, can you patrol the resource centres with Bass?"

"Got it. See you at dinner."

The long lingering gaze X and Zero shared before Zero left spoke for a hundred kisses. Finally Zero caught up with Wily saunter, still feeling the warmth of X's red eyes.

"You opened up my head last night," Zero hissed in Wily's ear in German.

"I went through a back door. I made you, boy," Wily responded.

"What is going on now?"

"Will you tell X?"

Zero fell silent. The two reploids' shoes clacked loudly down the hallway.

"I thought so," Wily said after a pause. "We're doing what's best for Neo Arcadia."

"Why can't we tell X?"

"If I told you, you would be very unhappy."

"Tell me," Zero urged, walking in front of Wily. Wily checked around them. Zero had led them to an anonymous section of the palace. The passage was open to the outside, with dusty orange air floating in from the city below.

"I don't think that's X."

Zero reared up, the skin of his chin doubling up from his disgust. "No."

"He doesn't always act like X."

"X is sick. He's sick and he needs help, but he's X. If I can't be copied, X can't be copied."

"But you were copied."

Zero got silent again. His neck relaxed.

"I think Weil copied X like he copied you. It's probably a look-alike body with one of X's black boxes in it, and then nothing but a stew of Weil's programming. If we can find the real X's body, we can reunite the missing black box with his system. They're called black boxes for a reason. They can survive a plane crash. They can survive anything. We just need to find him."

"But what if you're wrong?" Zero's voice was on the edge of a sob.

"Then I can still scrub Weil's code from X, just like I'm doing with yours. Tom will help." Wily held Zero's quivering black shoulder. "When Tom's finished helping Dr. Weil with whatever that snail-lover's cooking, he'll want to take a look at X. I finally got him to agree something's wrong. Just lay low until then. Can you do that?"

"Yes." Zero nodded.

"Okay, good." Wily patted Zero's shoulder before letting go. "I'll be working on your code inside a U-boat today. I'll be done by the time we get back."

"I thought you were lying about that. Aren't you going to look for X?"

"I'm ill-equipped to do that. Luckily, the guys who came to look for you are equally good at looking for X. That's the plan and they're already out there."

"Am I allowed to know who?"

"His big brother." Wily smiled, then began walking again with his hands behind his back, past a bewildered Zero.

"Rock?"

"Other big brother, Zero," Wily said sing-song. The high wedge heels of his white and teal suit clicked over the floor tile until carpet took over. Left behind in the yellow-litten hall, Zero was wracking his brain to remember if X had another older brother... the memory must have been in his missing century. Zero hurried after Wily when the doctor strutted past the doorway a second time, obviously lost.

Across the palace, Lumine and Rock teleported to Old Residential while Bass ran out the front door, begging fate to throw trouble in his way. The city shuddered under an earthquake, and a reploid named Zero caught a monitor before it fell on Ciel's head, miles away. Closer than anyone knew, X awoke.


	4. And to His Godhead forced halleluiahs sing.

Rock staggered after the teleport beam let go of him. The energy of the transfer was much different from the teleportation beams Light had used, and his systems rebelled. To his left, Lumine looked a bit sick as well. The lunar director shook his head, bouncing his forelocks briefly away from his righthand eye.

Old Residential sector lacked old world charm. Its streets were clogged with pipes and wires, yet plants kept struggling out of the concrete. Most of the houses visible from the teleport room's small window had rolls of bean vines hanging off of every brick, giving a green backdrop for the floating flowers of colour provided by clotheslined vests. Across the room, conduits ran out of the door along with black tyre scratches from innumerable trolleys. The interiors beyond were lit only to biologically necessary levels. The humans of Old Residential were living in the sunlight.

"Do you have the coördinates for Ciel's base?" Lumine asked Rock. Rock nodded and murmured assent. "All right. I'll see you later." Rock waited, increasingly fidgety while Lumine simply looked at him. X had gotten a kiss. Wily had gotten a kiss. "Is there something wrong, Rock?"

"No," Rock mumbled, then walked back to the teleporter. "I'll see you later."

"Stay safe," Lumine said as Rock jumped away into the light. He supposed Rock was still upset about Bass' aggression. It was something he would try not to think about.

The building became thick with institutional green as Lumine wandered farther into it. The keys on the door locks shone out office names while exit signs pointed the way between divisions. For some time, he thought he passed under the sky, but it was barely lit between the millions of black slivers layered under pipe and wire. An industrial canopy lay over the concrete alleyways, and soon there was no sun such that the difference between road and room blurred. Everywhere was concrete and metal, with the bricks and dirt of the human habitation far behind. Old Residential was the same as any other part of Neo Arcadia in its underground heart. Lumine felt himself sinking, floor by floor, yet he only hopped down one wide step at a time, incrementally descending by each room's threshold.

Finally, in the dark blue-green halls of the judicial sector, nestled in the half-light of archival glass cases and columns carved straight from the rock underfoot, Lumine located the room from his letters. Room 417 was distinguished only by number and the book of psalms displayed in the case opposite the door. Lumine knocked a few times, waited, repeated, then tested the door. It was open. Lumine opened room 417, finding no light on inside. The hallway was dim, but the room was pitch black. His eyes were as bright as any other source from the occasional machine indicator, and their orange glow shone brighter than the absurdly dull green dots around him. Green light was supposed to be the brightest, and yet he felt as he stuck his arm in front of him that the green shine only swallowed his hand in darkness.

Cautious, but not afraid, Lumine stepped into the shadow. He felt suddenly very alone, and when he looked back to the door, he couldn't see the hallway beyond. Perhaps the door closed automatically, he thought. He walked forward until his shins hit a table. Remembering the layout of thousands of rooms, he shuffled to the side to find a chair, and then walked backwards while trailing his hand in waves up and down the wall. He'd reach the light switch eventually, and if there was none, he would pull open his shirt and light the room himself. After circumnavigating the room, he found more chairs, a desk, and shelves full of jars, but no switch. Lumine folded apart the sides of his padded vest, then unclipped his leotard at the shoulders so that its front fell forward off of his upper chest. With a small mental effort, his green and blue crystal array lit, filling the room with a soft and pleasing dappled seafloor grue brighter than the stifling teal of the larger complex.

Lumine screamed brighter than his blazing yellow irises. His red pupils had contracted to pinpoints, refusing to see the thing in front of him for the few seconds of shock that overcame his mind. The table in front of him was made up of a piece of glass and the clean-cut body parts pounded into the concrete floor to hold it.

There were limb struts and abdominal plates curved over the four corners like claws, while internal wires braided neatly down from each knee and elbow to hold onto the gracefully curving arms that dug neatly into the concrete. Their blades were dull, but their colours still vibrant, the same factory violet that Lumine remembered. And there as a centrepiece set under the middle of the glass atop the dismembered torso, forever staring at the ceiling: the grey and pink head, its blue streaks swelled up over its eye sockets, its golden mandibles achingly peaceful.

Something touched Lumine's shoulder. Lumine shrieked again but rounded quickly to send his fist and quickly activated attack crystals at whatever was behind him. He saw the white body fly to the floor. He jumped back, aimed ice crystals directly at the struggling form that was making a noise, and only stopped overreacting when movement froze in ice and time.

Far across Neo Arcadia in a storage depot district, Bass hated himself. Since he hadn't teleported directly inside, he was forced to move quietly so that he could bypass the guards outside of the facility. He would have loved to fight and massacre them all, leaving their IC chips intact, of course. These were the big blue soldiers with cyclopean red eyes he'd dreamt of facing ever since X had promised him a match in the pre-meet messages. X had reneged on that promise. But Bass was bound by his own promise to Rock that he wouldn't beat up the guards without permission. The restriction ground on him like a sandstorm in his joints, but he refused to let himself break a promise. He'd be better than saintly X in one thing. So he moved quick and silent as a shadow deep into the storage facility where the actual transport lay.

After twenty corridors, he couldn't hear any noise from the outside even with his sensors at maximum. The only things remaining were the susurrus of liquid coolant and the soft brush of his fingertips when he stopped himself against walls. The transport room soon emitted noise. Machines whirred and let out high pitched beeps that only children and dogs could hear. The one guard on duty shifted around loudly, from his tramping feet to the click of his weapon by his side. Perched on the ceiling like a cave centipede, looking down through the wide window into the room at a hidden oblique angle, Bass considered his options. He could easily send a shot to take out the guard. They were a human, or at least a shoddily armoured reploid. They were probably more of a transporter technician than an actual guard. They had no idea what they were doing with their gun. It would be such a clean and easy kill that Bass hated it. But he needed into the transporter to get to the next —probably equally empty and unexciting— storage facility since he did _not_ want to enter stealth mode again.

The transporter powered up. Bass and the guard paid immediate attention. A few forms appeared in the rushing yellow light. Details crawled into view as Bass sped his image capture to hundreds of frames per second. There were no suits of armour coming. All of the arrivals were civilians, with long hair and impractical clothing. There was a gun. The gun materialised out of yellow into gunmetal grey. The gun shot. The transport technician fell to the floor, dead.

Rock arrived in the resistance base with his hands held high and his head bent submissively. He stayed still after materialising for a long while before looking up. No one had yelled at him. The room was empty. There were two chairs intended for transport technicians sitting empty, but the bric-a-brac at the stations and one warmish cup of wild fruit tea said that someone had been here recently. It smelled lovely, honestly. The room was more pink and inviting than Rock had expected.

The more he wandered around it, the more Rock was surprised at the resistance base. There couldn't have been more than a dozen people here. Most of the voices he heard through the walls were gathered at the far end, so he stayed away. He was surely an intruder, after all, and he didn't want to start a fight or get captured if he didn't have to. After padding up and down stairs, he finally found the living quarters. Each room was labelled for its occupants, and some decorated like elementary school children.

Outside of the door labelled for Zero, Rock paused. It must have been the room for the copy Zero he'd learned about just that morning. He touched the door. It was cold, faintly scratched, and smelled of nothing. The door opened to his prolonged touch. Rock stepped back gingerly, but then stared at the small cubbyhole of a room beyond. There were labelled boxes of ammunition covered in dust. The recharger had no indents from hand or head, no stains from lubricant, nor stray threads from worn clothing. The dust on the floor had one line moving from door to recharger, days of walking back and forth in one solemn column. The room made Rock sad.

Turning from the desolate space designed to be a home, Rock continued down the hall. There was a larger door at the end, and already Rock could read the name on its cloud-shaped plate, 'Ciel.' He absently thought that she might not be there since the rest of the base was barely staffed. He stood taller as he walked to force doubts from himself. The mission was too important. Still, he paused outside the door, considering knocking like a civilised person. Again, the door opened after he stood too long.

Ciel was a short girl of about 14 or 15 years with long blonde hair and bright blue eyes. The person standing in her room with their gaze locked on her bed was a short reploid of indeterminate dollike age and face with long blonde hair. Their pit-black eyes turned slowly in the deep carved sockets until they fixed on Rock. They didn't say anything. They were dressed like Zero.

Rock was prepared for the attack when it came. He closed his eyes and partitioned his IC chip. Under a slice of green, his throat came undone.

Trapped below Lumine's chest light was a death's head creature with arms entirely too long. Its waist was sunken in and its white suit sucked around the bits of body gristle still attached to its spine or pooled in hips and ribcage. The mauve lining of its cloak and casque had frozen stiff in mid-air, framing the horribly bent skeletal thing like a rose on velvet. Slowly, like an ebbing tide washing out his memory, Lumine noticed the golden tree of the Eight Gentle Judges wrapped around the thing's neck and wrists. The mauve boot plates still stuck outside the ice twitched. Lumine sat down straight on the pile of mason jars behind him. He felt like an undignified fool.

When he'd regained his composure and self-respect, Lumine sent a pulse of heat toward the ice and then deactivated his powers. The ice thawed easily in the hot room. The reploid who crawled out of its slurry seemed overburdened by the heavy wetness of their clothing. Their eyes were white, and the bold stripe of the rigor mortis grin bevelled into their deathmask didn't move when they spoke.

"Technically, that's illegal," the judge said.

"Oh," Lumine breathed.

"Attacking one of the Eight Gentle Judges," they continued in a low road-tar drawl. Their long arms and curled fingers scraped along the ground in front of burden-bent knees.

"I'm sorry. I was startled." Lumine raised his voice confidently as he pointed at the horrid table. "And that is a friend of mine! If you killed him and turned him into a table, I will continue attacking you, and I will win."

"Lumine," the judge said the name in an overly familiar tone. Lumine glared, still pointing ; he was ready to reactivate his attack pattern. "It's me."

"You?"

"Darkneid."

"Darkneid?" Lumine's finger faltered, then his arm. "Darkneid!" Lumine's hands flew to his chest crystal, blocking out the only useful light in the room. The bright blue reflected only up to his scrunched up face from between his clasped fists and tightly tucked arms. He breathed once heavily, clearing the artificial adrenaline from his system. His arms softened, and the blue light faded in through the slight flare of his long white sleeves. Lumine opened his eyes again, still stuck between pain and relief. "You look beautiful."

"Do I? Most folk think the skull bit's too much." The judge pointed at his face.

"It suits you," Lumine decided. "I should have known."

"I came up behind you, boss."

"You— I'm not—" Lumine covered the exposed half of his face with his hand. "Many things are going wrong at once, recently. I wanted to see someone who was still the same."

"And here I am," Darkneid joked drily.

"Somehow, X with red eyes is worse." Lumine laid his hands on his knees. His face had decided on his usual slightly amused neutral expression to greet Darkneid properly.

The sodden judge sat on the table made of his old body, looking like a dredged up piece of machinery. His long arms rested at their balancing point on his thighs. His three peaked mitre was askew, adding an air of harmlessness. Death fell in a pond.

"Are you hurt?" Lumine asked.

"Naw."

"How did this happen?"

"I managed to live through the Elf Wars. Tried to give up killing. Went into law. I told you all that."

"In our correspondence, yes."

"I told you I got promoted too."

"And your physical evolution matched concurrently. I see now. But you should have told me before I came down here."

"Guess it slipped my mind. I've been deep inside dead bodies, trying to save IC chips from both them Zeros. Find out what's wrong."

"A most noble endeavour," Lumine said with honest approval. "Schilt mentioned that his colleague 'Deathtanz' has been examining cadavers. That's you, isn't it?"

"Sure is. Deathtanz Mantisk."

"A dance of death?" Lumine translated the bilingual name, his legs sliding together until the hexagons at his ankles met. "Is that what I should call you now?"

The long limbed judge laughed in a series of clicks. "K-k-k-k, naw. I think I'll always be Darkneid Kamakil to you, boss."

"No matter how things change," Lumine remarked fondly. 

Bass listened to the tiny version of Rock in his imagination that was telling him not to jump out and trounce the killers who had just come through the transporter. It took a great deal of self-restraint. He remained attached to the ceiling by metal claws, with his head turned around completely like an owl. Below, the intruders filed out of the transport room. They spread out, looking each way, but lacking any real organisation or watchfulness. Bass was insulted. His new toys weren't worth playing with.

"There's no one else around. No other ID tag pings until the outside perimeter," said one of the civilian soldiers, a grey haired lady with a little laptop. A taller and younger reploid with shoulder length black hair holstered his gun. That wasn't the gun that had killed the guard.

The smoking gun was in the hands of a little girl wearing a pink parka and mini skirt over cream leggings. She didn't look sorry for what she'd done, but she wasn't spiteful. She'd simply shot because it was the best solution, and it had been an outcome she'd planned for. Bass could read it all in her erect posture, spring-loaded muscles, and her eyes that were far too old. Still, she didn't look up.

"We have fifteen minutes before the perimeter guards notice his tag's down. Unload as much as you can," the girl ordered. The rest of her group sprang into action. A short reploid began stealing directly from the transporter control room. The tall reploid clocked out the lock of a room with his pistol, then two others started pulling out containers. The girl in charge joined up with the laptop lady, then the two of them rushed right under Bass while mentioning the kitchen.

Bass's processor came unstuck from its rut of observation. The girl looked exactly like the picture of Ciel that Rock had shown him. Ciel was here, not with Rock. Rock was supposed to be here.

Cursing inwardly, Bass redoubled his stealth efforts. He put air cushions on his feet to follow the two ladies on foot, so that he wouldn't risk losing them or displaying his presence with tiny pieces of falling ceiling from where his claws would dig in and out. Completely on edge, he called out for Rock over radio, their intimate frequency.

Rock was lost in darkness. Then he opened his eyes. He wasn't dead or even decapitated. His neck hurt horribly. He could feel his internal lubricants and carrier fluids spilling down onto his cute blue and gold outfit. He looked down where the cross shape was already black from wet. He looked to the right side to see the high pressure spray had spackled his puffy white sleeve in cinnabar red. Some of the carrier fluids were already reacting with digestive acid to precipitate pure mercury. It made his blood sparkle. Then he remembered to turn on his ears. Shock sure was a thing.

"X! X!" Someone was yelling in distress. Rock forced himself into awareness since someone else must have been hurt. Was it X? Was X here, and hurt? Abruptly, a strong hand flipped him onto his back. The blond reploid who looked and sounded just like Zero was crying, holding Rock's poofy shoulders, and still yelling. "X, I'm so sorry!"

"Is X okay?" Rock asked. His vocaliser and the muscle lines operating his jaws were open to the air. That was a strange feeling.

"I cut your throat ; I'm so sorry!"

"It's only there to keep my neck cords untangled and pump mercury to the temperature circuits," Rock said comfortingly as if it really were a trifling thing. "It's okay."

"It's not okay!"

"Do you have duct tape?" Rock started to squirm under the copy Zero's grasp. X was still hurt somewhere. They didn't have time for this.

"Duct tape?"

"Yeah, we can just tape my throat up. It's not a big problem. Now is X okay?"

"No, I— I mean yes, I guess you're okay?"

"Yes," Rock repeated with confidence, "I'm okay."

"I'm so sorry, X." The copy Zero pulled Rock into his arms, holding ever so tight. His hands cradled Rock tenderly at the small of his back, the nape of his neck. "X, oh, X. You're back. You're real again."

"Me? Oh, wait, I'm, um..." Having pieced together copy Zero's misconception, Rock bit off his own words. He didn't fully understand copy Zero's mental state, and considering the reploid's hello had been a throat slashing, playing along seemed like the number one best way out of this.

"I thought your original body was destroyed," copy Zero said by Rock's silicone ear. The reploid's breaths were warm and tickly, and heavy with the signals of grief and relief from one cybernetic organism to another.

"I'm not sure about that?" Rock said uncertainly yet honestly.

"You're back," copy Zero repeated. He sat up with Rock in his arms, effortlessly manoeuvring the new generation reploid body to straddle his lap, then winding Rock's arms around his neck. Copy Zero's black eyes were endless, his white face rapt. His hands returned to Rock's tender parts with reverent softness, then he leant forward. The kiss was brief but exquisite. "I love you."

"Uhhh..." Whatever Rock was preparing to say drowned in the next assault of lips on his. This kiss had the hunger of years, a terrifying claim, with the copy's soft lips and tongue moving with the strength of steel. Rock couldn't avoid making mumbling meeps as he felt his tongue sucked on. That was a step too far.

Rock pushed Zero off of him, shouting, "I'm not X! Stop it!"

"You're not..." copy Zero's voice trailed off from a stubborn interjection into confusion. His thumbs tried to touch under Rock's eyes and pull down, but Rock slapped them away.

"Don't touch me." Rock pushed himself off of copy Zero's lap, then stood. "Like that," he corrected his previous statement. If the copy Zero wanted to cut him again for not being X, he'd live with it, but he wouldn't be kissed by someone he wasn't married to, and a copy of his little brother's husband, to boot.

"X has green eyes," copy Zero stated.

"Yes. And I have blue ones." Rock pulled down his vest and tucked in his tight shirt from where copy Zero had reached under them to get at his nipples.

"You look exactly like him." Copy Zero was still seated, having a hard time coming to grips with the situation.

"We have different hair, too. I part my hair this way." Huffy, Rock ran his fingers through his hair to pull the part into higher relief. "And X has a big red blotch on his forehead, blotching things up."

"But you look the same," copy Zero said helplessly.

"And I have ears!" Rock finished his tiny tirade.

Copy Zero stood. He now looked warily at Rock, and his hand hovered dangerously near his locked chain rod. The blade of it was still dripping with Rock's fluids.

"So you're not X. Then who are you?"

"I'm Rock, X's older brother."

"X has an older brother?"

"Yes, Dr. Light made me."

"Who's Dr. Light?"

"How can you not know who Dr. Light is—" Rock's voice stopped short. Bass was calling him.

"Should I know who that is?" Zero asked in a tinge of irritation while Rock was busy listening to Bass' rasp over the radio.

"Oh no. I have to go. We have to go? This isn't good. I need to see Ciel."

"I don't know who you are," the copy Zero argued. "I can't just take your word that you know X. And I can't let you see Ciel."

"Do I look armed? I was demilitarised centuries, three centuries ago, and I need to talk to Ciel about the energy crisis."

"Did Neo Arcadia send you?" Copy Zero drew his chain rod from its holster and pressed the spiked edge in the undercleft between jaw and neck. This time if he pushed, it would go straight up into Rock's circuits.

"N-no?" Rock was overwhelmingly alarmed. "But I-I-I, uh, I'm asking for Neo Arcadia."

The copy's eyes thinned. He sliced a new line up the bottom of Rock's jaw. Rock's tongue muscle bulged out of the slit, and only got more caught in the opening as he tried to talk. He brought his hands up to his throat to push the flexible mesh and powered wires back in, but copy Zero caught both of his wrists and wrenched them behind his back. Rock cried out.

"It's you," copy Zero growled. "You tried to dress like a civilian but I should have known."

Copy Zero tore the sheets off of Ciel's bed, then wrapped Rock in them and tore their ends to tie him up tight. The copy shoved Rock onto the bed, then tore out the cords connecting Ciel's computer to the wall. He attached his prisoner to the iron bar headboard with LAN cable, tied by Rock's tattered neck.

"You're not going anywhere and you're not talking to anyone," the copy ordered. Rock stayed silent. "I'll be back with Ciel, and then she can decide what to do with you. Ciel made you. Ciel."

The copy looked ready to spit at Rock, but instead he turned and left the room, filling Rock's sight with a flash of yellow.

"Rock? Rock what happened? Answer already, Rock!" Bass screamed over the radio.

"I'll be okay. Ciel is going to come see me."

"But what _happened?_ "

"I met the copy Zero."

"The copy Zero!!"

"Yes but don't be mad at him."

"Roooock. I am going to kill him," Bass explained as if to a child.

"Don't! He seems very confused. He thought I was X, even, and kissed—" Rock decided not to finish that sentence but it was too late.

"I am going to kill him!" Bass screamed again.

"Please don't. Pretty please don't. I don't want to start a war."

"They've already killed a guy over here."

"Bass, we need to stick to the plan," Rock explained calmly. "The copy Zero is headed your way because he said he'd get Ciel. If you stay put, you can fight him. Fight him, not kill him. And I need you to just follow him until Ciel comes back through the transporter, because I can't talk to her if she's still where you are. Okay? Okay baebae?"

"Fine," Bass grumbled, "we do it your way. I didn't kill the guards this morning, Rock."

"I'm very proud of you. Thank you."

"I'm not feeling it," Bass fished for compliments while he waited.

"You're such a good boy, Bass. You did a noble thing and I love you for it and..." Tied up and unmoving, Rock obliged.

Deep under Old Residential, in the forest green residential district as dim as a jungle floor, Darkneid tapped on a mason jar to wake up the LEDning-bugs inside. The tiny lights flicked on and began lazily crawling around the inside of the one jar, then the second, then the third. The mantis reploid handed one jar to Lumine. It was a strange thing for Lumine to see a white hand at the end of that long arm. Despite their continued electronic correspondence, Lumine wondered how much about Darkneid Kamakil had changed irrevocably into the entity that was "Deathtanz Mantisk" while they were apart.

"You think Weil has altered the rebuilt reploids," Lumine stated. Reflections from the LEDning-bugs bounced around his big orange eyes. He liked this moment. "Individually? And how?"

"It's factory deep," Darkneid said unhappily, sitting back down on his own pallet of jars. "He hasn't gotten to Schilt's recycling centre yet, but Inarabitta went off the deep end a week ago. All of a sudden, reploids start looking at things Weil's way." Darkneid made an unhappy chittering sound. "Chrrrrrr. All them from Inarabitta's plant don't act like people no more. But I'm not in control there, and X lets it happen."

"Has X been acting differently?"

"That's a joke, right? He's Weil through and through. Nothing like the X in charge of Neo Arcadia. I'd say he's more like the X that was pissed at me back then, yanno. Ch-c-ch." Darkneid flicked his right hand with a brief chitter. "But he's worse than that. Too out of it to even be ticked off from his high horse. I'd listen to a dozen lectures on 'justice' from him if we could get some actual justice done. Chrrr."

"Who else is compromised, that you know?"

"In the judges?"

"Yes."

Darkneid sat up a bit, thinking with deep clicks from his tapping foot instead of his throat. "Kelverian, Cubit, Volteel, Glacier, all them. Schilt's okay; so am I. But I dunno about Flizard. That's most of us though."

"It must be a mirror to the system Dr. Wily found in Zero."

"Hehn, what's that?"

Lumine considered revealing the information. The lights were warm in his hands. They lit up the pale line where his hip-high boots met the black of his undersuit. "Our best guess, Wily and I, is that Dr. Weil is aiming to control Zero when he connects to the Omega armour."

"I guess he's already controlling the rest of them."

"You think so?"

Deathtanz lit up another mason jar then slid it onto the glass-top table with a clean rattling sound. Light from the line of four jars brought out the lovely curve of his two scythes underneath. Past shock, Lumine appreciated the art that the Gentle Judge had made with his former body. The macabre beauty spoke to him like the tortured lines of Spanish architecture Nuveau.

"I can't do anything about it. I'm a regular judge. I arbitrate court cases."

"You do still have scythes? Somewhere?"

"I have a beast form, yeah. But y'see, here's the thing : I keep 'em dull."

"Oh virtuous battousai," Lumine remarked. He raised the mason jar to his lips, then remembered it was not a tea cup. He laughed briefly. "I went back in time for a moment there. Ah, never mind. It really is beautiful here, in the almost-dark, the fugilin green, the glass in the midst of nothingness when I forget the invisible walls. And here I am with a ghost, white and lavender both of us, matching. For a second, I forgot that the world was falling apart around us."

"Only down here on Earth," Darkneid riposted.

"You can come to the moon," Lumine offered softly.

"Then who'll be your mole? Naw, it's better for me down here. I'll always have the darkness. Awh, one sec." The mantis reploid stood only into a crouch, cocking his three pronged crown. "Someone unregistered came in through the teleporter."

"Someone unregistered?"

"Last time it was you. It's a public courthouse. We get plenty of undocumented people. Oh, I have video feed."

"...And?" Lumine was finding the wait for information not as unbearable as his desire to be connected to the camera as well, as he would have been were he still on the moon, a director in charge of everything.

"It's that copy Zero. He's heading for the prison. Fixing to free the rebels we have." Darkneid winced. "The guards can't handle him. I have to go."

"I'll go with you." Lumine stood fully. The jar light showed his determined face.

"Don't. Stay here. This is my facility. I'll free the rebels if it means he'll leave the guards alone. We'll just talk."

Lumine wanted to argue, but he sat back down warily. They stared at one another. Darkneid took Lumine's silence for assent. He stood on spindly legs and stalked to the door. Darkness tumbled down his back. Lumine didn't hear the door close.

Fifteen minutes later, long after Darkneid's radio channel had died, Lumine realised that Darkneid had left his shadows behind to protect his director. His boss. The fact shot Lumine's power core heart. The director carefully put down the jar he'd been holding next to the others. He hurried out of the room and the concealing darkness.

Right outside of the jail cells, the Gentle Judge Deathtanz Mantisk lay in a green oozing heap. His claws were struck into the floor on either side of him while his legs and head folded into a battered square. Lumine saw a phantom piece of glass on top of the battered body that died beautifully. His mind showed him a table, and he screamed Darkneid's name.

"Rock, Bass, he's in terrible shape," Lumine said over radio. He dug through the mantis' plating to find the IC chip, praying that it would be intact along with as many memories as possible. But Copy Zero had not been kind. "Where are you two?"

"I'm at the rebel base waiting for Ciel," Rock replied. "They're on high alert now. Bass?"

"Same place, beating up losers!" Bass said proudly. Rock realised what that meant immediately.

"You are the reason the sirens are going off!"

Bass scoffed. "Just turn off your—"

"Quiet!" Lumine sent his radio signal strongly. "My friend is hurt. I'm taking him back to the palace."

"Your friend?" Bass asked in disbelief.

"I have friends other than you two! Now get your jobs done!" Lumine shut off his communication.

"I've never heard him mad like _that_ before," Bass commented as he smashed a short reploid's visor. Fighting five at once was fun.

"Why did you have to fight people. Why are you doing this," Rock opined.

Bass shut off his end of the communiqué. He didn't want to hear it. Rock was left to listen to the blaring klaxons. For seven minutes. When Ciel and copy Zero arrived, Rock had the sick satisfaction that by being detained brawling at the other side of the compound, instead of coming to his hogtied husband's rescue, Bass was now missing the fight of his life.


	5. For this must be our task in Heav'n,

"She wanted to reprogram me. She thought I was a copy X, _her_ copy X. I asked what happened to the real X, and she says this copy Zero had to destroy his body _for the greater good_ which is somehow okay because he's floating around as an ELF. As if it's okay to kill someone just because you're sure their ghost will come back! When everyone knows ELFs don't live forever. So X is probably going to fade away and die. And Ciel and Copy Zero teamed up to open my skull. And that still smarts. Then Bass burst in to get me out of there. So what can we do," Rock concluded morosely. The duct tape around his neck and under his chin felt too tight, he was thirsty from lost carrier fluids, and the doctors at the hospital had snapped his removable scalp-plate back on wrong so a big square of his hair stuck up like a duck butt. He stood behind Lumine in the Neo Arcadian hospital's reploid wing, clearly unhappy.

Lumine had brought back a messy corpse of wires and shredded plating. These remains of Deathtanz Mantisk, once known as Darkneid, splayed out of the hospital bed, a spiderweb of cables plugged into diagnostic and life support machines. It was all to force what little was left of the gangly inner systems into a curative stasis. Dr. Weil had come by with Dr. Light, his creaky voice promising to repair _his_ Gentle Judge. Lumine had risen from his bedside vigil in a froth of fury and light. Optic Sunflower's power poured out of him until Weil and his entourage exited. Lumine hadn't left the body since.

Rock didn't like it. Lumine had been perfectly horrified by the condition Rock had come back in, with his throat slit open and the bottom of his tongue hanging out, but he hadn't been truly worried for Rock's wellbeing. He'd diagnosed Rock's injuries immediately as superficial, and continued to guard his charge. That his assessment was correct did nothing to mollify Rock. Rock wanted to be fussed over and pampered, just as he'd spent his life fussing over others. Just once. "This isn't the Injury Olympics and my pain is just as valid," he thought as he stood behind Lumine and the half-dead reploid, waiting for an answer. He wasn't of right enough mind to notice that this selfishness was something more in Lumine's mein.

"Thus, we really do have two X's," Lumine finally said, compiling the information Rock had given him. "One whom Ciel created."

"Yes and it was really scary and I'm not happy about it," Rock prompted.

Lumine turned in his seat, then put out his arms. "Come, my bebbu."

Rock sat down on Lumine's lap with force. "Thank you," he announced. He laid his head on the moonlight lavender of Lumine's goosedown-padded shoulder. Lumine's bare hands came up, one to hold him around his upper back, the other to stroke his dark brown hair. Adult, Rock was bigger and sturdier than Lumine in all dimensions, but was too happy with the petting to remark on how awkward they must have looked. His thoughts sat in memories with his younger self, the young Rock who had stared up at the barren moon with the time-displaced Lumine. Rock had been very small, and Lumine very tall.

"My brave little Rock..." Lumine began spilling comforts. They sat amid the beep and whoosh of life support while Lumine pet Rock over and over, his pretty white sleeves and boots dappled green and stiff with Mantisk's gore.

Bustling in the reploid wing awoke Rock from his half-slumber and Dr. Weil's cough broke Lumine from his relaxed repetitions. Lumine's head turned in place, gaze fixed on the door, daring the horrid doctor to come in. Dr. Weil passed by the doorway, but only briefly made eye contact with the lunar ambassador. The brevity of the look said to Lumine that he was nothing to Weil. The doctor of engineering hurried on with actual medical personnel in tow.

Rock stood, heading to the door. Lumine pawed at the back of his blue vest.

"Rock, were are you going?"

"Someone else must be hurt. They're important if Weil is back here. I want to see who it is."

"I don't want you alone with him."

"Him?"

"Weil. Stay with me. I don't want him to take you too."

"You and Papa shouldn't distrust him so soon. X trusts him," Rock laid out his concerns.

"He may be a copy X."

"That's really insulting."

"But what if it's true?" Lumine brushed his bangs from his face, imploring Rock to come to the same conclusions he had.

"We don't know that. We know there is a copy X out there, according to the copy Zero, and that Ciel made him. But that doesn't mean Weil is involved, just because you don't like him."

Lumine thinned his eyes and mouth, but didn't argue. Lock by lock, his hair fell back into place over his right eye. Once again, a feeling of terrible powerlessness set in. He let Rock go.

Rock hurried out into the right-hand corridor to chase Weil. Back by the elevators, Weil and his entourage waited. Trying to decide on what to ask first, Rock stepped toward them, his hands clenching in worry. Weil had the same dismissive stare that had looked past Lumine.

"Who did you just come from?" Rock asked, putting the new patient in front of anyone else.

"The gentle judge Schilt," a doctor said.

"Schilt?! I have to..." Rock's decision was cut off by the opening elevator doors. Dr. Light stepped out. Rock forgot to call him by his official name. "Oh, Daddy, the copy Zero has been hurting everyone!"

Dr. Light was immediately at Rock's side, a supportive hand on his shoulder, and the other feeling at his son's throat over the duct tape. "I know, Rock. Heaven's Army probably found out what we just did, the location of the Dark Elf."

"And they— they kill people for it?" Rock asked.

"X says that the copy Zero has been destroying places and people who can help. Flizard at the geothermal power centre, the only steady source they still have. Childre at the highway for distributing aid, both gone. Schilt at the repair factory. Now Deathtanz. It's obvious. X is right."

"X is..." Rock trailed off when Weil made a loud croak. The elevator doors closed around him and the doctors. Lights tracked their descent.

"Dr. Weil is sending Zero to retrieve the Dark Elf. Everything will be better now. I came to see how you are."

"I'm fine."

"It feels like you were cut very deep. I don't have any automatic synthflesh, or I'd..."

"I know, Daddy." Rock guided Dr. Light's hands off his neck. "It'll wait. I'm fine underneath. Can you fix my hair? Then I have to check on Schilt."

"Of course. Do you know where Bass went?" Light immediately went to tend to the misaligned skull entry patch.

"He's hunting the copy Zero of course. I told him I was fine." Rock grimaced because he'd let Bass go off on a violent mission, and because he'd lied. He didn't feel fine and wanted nothing more than to tell Bass that, then force the black bot to hug him. But other people always came first, especially when so many were dying. "Daddy, you need to help Lumine."

"Well, he's a Cossack bot, but I'll try."

"It's not anything wrong with his body. But he's very upset, and he won't let me in right now. Maybe he's mad at me. But. You're the best to talk to." Rock looked down, tugging at his blue shorts.

"That's something you two should talk about," Light said gently.

"No, his friend just almost died, and I got jealous at him having a friend I didn't know about, so I'm a terrible person."

"No you're not."

"I need to see how Schilt is. Will you talk to Lumine, please?" Rock tiptoed backward.

"All right, Rock."

At that, Rock turned and half ran back down the hall. When Rock passed by Darkneid Deathtanz' room, Lumine didn't even look back.

Sitting up in bed, Schilt looked much better than his compatriot down the hall. Some of his plating was missing, and his erstwhile wings were in tatters, and of course one of his horns had been lopped off in his fight against the copy Zero, but he was awake. Schilt had heard the steps coming toward him from far away. Few things escaped his ears. Yet he had been staring at the wall in front of him blankly, trying to identify the unfamiliar footfalls. When they finally rested at his door, he was forced to look to identify his visitor. It was Rock. Schilt's processor went into overdrive; his heart dangerously skipped a beat.

Rock, Rock, Rock, handsome Rock, gallant Rock, soft eyed Rock was here to see him. Schilt thrilled. He'd read everything he could about the current Lunar ambassador and former saviour of the world since they met. Rock was perfect, literally without fault. On top of that, he was a bigamist, which while considered by many an actual fault, Schilt regarded as a wondrous promise for their future. Weil said he could. Weil had wonderful plans.

"Rock," Schilt said.

"How are you feeling, your honour Schilt?" Rock stepped into the room, smiling. Schilt's wide eyes followed his every move worshipfully.

"Just Schilt."

"O-okay."

"I am enchanted to see you at my bedside."

"I just wanted to see how you were."

"As of present: wonderful. I'll need cosmetic repairs, and my weapons systems are quite unusable, as is this arm," Schilt said as he indicated his right, "but I am alive and you are here. Please, sit here. There are things I must tell you." Schilt patted on his left-hand side. Rock sat, although he felt a bit too close to the patient and didn't want to dominate the bed space.

"There are things I have to ask you, too," Rock said. "D-do you have enough room?"

"Oh yes."

"Do you know if, if X, gosh, I should tell you. You're with Harpuia and all."

"What is it, Rock?" Schilt placed his hand over Rock's. Rock removed his hand from the touch.

"The leader of Heaven's Army, Ciel. She didn't hand over the energy system, and she said she created a copy of X." Rock lowered his voice to a whisper. "That could be the X who's in charge now."

"I know that," Schilt said, nodding. "Dr. Weil told me after he finished my emergency repairs. The X in charge now is the copy X."

"What should we do?"

"Nothing. Dr. Weil has planned for everything. Once the copy Zero fights the copy X and triggers his second mode, the bomb will detonate, and then Dr. Weil will rule Neo Arcadia. Omega and the Dark Elf will combine into an unlimited power under Dr. Weil's control. This will save the world."

"Wait, is this— is this part of Harpuia's coup?"

"Harpuia? Oh that. That doesn't mean anything now. When Dr. Weil rules Neo Arcadia, I'll have power too. I'll have enough power to protect you so something like this never happens again." Schilt grabbed Rock's hand again, drawing it to his chest.

"I don't need protection." Rock tried to remove his hand again, but Schilt held fast.

"Because you have Bass? I heard about that. I also heard he's left you alone. He's left you very many times to chase a fight. It's all there in the archives. And Lumine? You don't think he really loves you? I've heard that too. I've heard so many things; how he won't let you touch him. I'll touch you, Rock."

"No." Rock stood up, and tugged his arm against Schilt's grip. Schilt pulled until Rock lost his balance. Then Schilt turned over, dragging Rock under his weight. Rock was wider, but Schilt was more determined, despite not having control of his right arm. His left kept a hold of Rock's Wrist with a death grip. Schilt tried to kiss him, but Rock's hand blocked the judge's mouth. "No," Rock reprimanded, pushing at Schilt's face. He couldn't believe someone was trying to kiss him again.

Rock mustered the strength to push Schilt off of him, then roll off the bed. His right arm tugged at its socket painfully as Schilt wouldn't let go. Still Rock pulled and kicked at the floor and bedposts to gain traction. He took conscious control of his skin so he could will his ornamental sweating into hyper-production. Soon enough, his hand slipped out of the Neo Arcadian glove and Schilt's grip. Rock bolted for the door.

Too soon, Schilt had grabbed Rock by the upper arm, and thrown him against the wall. Rock cried out before the judge was on him again, in a tight and twisting kiss. Rock didn't give an inch, and his knee crashed right up into Schilt's abdomen. Schilt yelped but then moved his body to pin the old robot. Rock decided to scream, "No!"

"Don't you understand? Everything on your file says you can love me. I'm just one more husband. Dr. Weil is going to rule the world, and everything will be just right, and then Dr. Weil said I could have you!"

The punch connected with Schilt's head unexpectedly. It was a well-executed strike, with plenty of force behind it. But the person behind the punch yelled when it connected, face contorted in pain. The arm crumpled after the hit but so did Schilt with his weapons turned off. Schilt tried kicking from the floor after his own counterstrike hit air. But then he found something horrible and cold all over his body, and he was unable to move under the snowdrift. A foot crashed down into Schilt's skull, breaking off his remaining horn. It was only then that time caught up with Rock and he realised that Lumine had burst into the room and had indeed yelled "Don't touch my husband."

Lumine panted and cradled his painful punching hand. He looked at Rock, asking with his worried eye after the older bot's condition. Rock tried to smile, but he was frankly overwhelmed. Lumine smiled instead, tiredly showing teeth.

"I think he's gone maverick," Lumine said.

Rock finally smiled. "There's no such thing," Rock parroted Lumine's usual talking point.

"Right." Lumine hissed when he tried to uncurl his fist again. "Darkneid informed me that Weil has been tampering in people's processors once they are brought in for repairs. I dare say that was the case here. Darkneid had described Schilt as a retiring and nonviolent gentleman, of impeccable manners."

"I sure hope so," Rock said without fondness. "But he did hurt me."

"Where," Lumine asked as he extended his hurt hand out toward Rock's face, not daring to touch him.

"Right here." Rock leant his head into Lumine's hand, then closed the distance between them so their chests met. Rock's then put Lumine's free hand over his own heart. Lumine kissed Rock's bangs.

"The ice imprisoning him will last for quite a while. Shall we retire?"

"Mhm."

"Do you want to be carried?"

"Mhmmm." Rock hid his head in Lumine's lavender vest before he was swept into a bridal carry. Once they entered the elevator, Rock spoke out. "Will you kiss me?"

"Kiss you?"

"Right here, Lumine," Rock said into Lumine's chest.

"Right here?" Lumine stopped in the doorway. Rock wiggled in his grasp, turning farther into his body with clutching hands.

"Right heeere." Rock wiggled in Lumine's grasp until they faced one another. "I wanna kiss you riiight here."

They kissed slowly, letting their hands hold one another tenderly. Truly worshipful, they kissed one another and even let their tongues meet. Their fingers laced together. Their eyes closed. They tasted the sweetness of each other's love in the deep kiss, and felt the warm glow of one another's nuclear hearts. Finally, Rock pulled away, leaving one last peck to Lumine's chin.

"You were so hot when you came to save me. For real, no RP. I'm so happy to be your husband right now, Lumine," Rock said.

"I love you," Lumine said with stunned blankness. It felt like a dream. His stomach clenched.

"I love you too, no matter what," Rock said, looking at Lumine with honest determination.

Rock kissed Lumine again, filling the newgen's heart completely. Lumine felt beyond words, only cooing when Rock's arms settled around him for their favourite cuddles. Lumine held Rock too, just as he wanted, hoping that now Rock knew just how much he treasured him. Rock, of course, had never stopped treasuring his husband. Eventually, the elevator brought them back to the first floor, and they exited it hand in hand.

Screens all over the hospital and the city turned on. The override broadcast barged into every feed, overcame every streaming video, and popped up on top of every application. Emergency sirens flared then were cut dead. Dr. Weil's face scratched itself onto every screen. Then, Dr. Weil spoke.

"Hear me, citizens of the great land of Neo Arcadia. I must inform you of sorrowful news. Just now, our hero, Master X, was taken by blood-thirsty extremists, and he has sadly passed away."

Amid the worried rustle of the hospital, Lumine and Rock drew closer to each other, afraid. Something had gone terribly wrong. Whether the X in the throne room was the real X or a copy, his death was too soon.

"So, in accordance with ordinance #8, I, Dr. Weil, will become your new leader. It is time to put a stop to these extremists!"

Rock pounded a fist into his thigh while he sucked up a sob. On every personal computer around him connected to a citizen account, a window popped up asking for citizen ratification of the power transfer.

"This is my fault," Rock said. "I should have gone to X right away. Schilt told me what Weil was planning. I could have..."

Lumine cut rock off, his hand lifting Rock's fist. "No, it's not your fault. We were in the elevator for only ten minutes. It would have taken you that long to get to the throne room."

"Not if I ran!"

"Who knows how recently X passed? Weil could have been sitting on the information. It's not your fault."

"It is." Rock let go of Lumine, hating himself for putting love above his brother's safety. He tried to tell himself that he was sure Schilt had been rambling madly, or that he'd been too upset by the assault to think straight, but he knew that those were excuses. He'd failed to do his job as protector of the world.

The progress bar for citizen approval filled. The red colour showing disapproval hid in a sliver at the end, dwarfed by the blue hatred for the terrorists of Heaven's Army. Weil began speaking again.

"Thank you all. I have just confirmed your approval. I will have to ask you all to do a number of things. Neo Arcadia cannot know true peace until the extremists are eradicated! Let us all fight together, until they are wiped out!" Then Dr. Weil laughed. It was a horrible sound that broke free of his hoarse croak into full bellowing power. The feed ended.

"It's all my fault," Rock repeated to his big round shoes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am assuming here that copy Zero completed his missions against Hanumachine et al with timing in line with actual gameplay, thus only about twenty minutes passed between the missile mission and the X mission. This is why Weil's announcement comes so quickly after the first four gentle judges fall. Please always let me know if I should have tagged something in warning, such as the new tag for non-consensual kissing. Thank you all so very much for reading!


	6. From burden'd tongues must spill delight.

X spent most of his time in the cluttered abyss of the resistance servers. Through thin windows that stretched as tendrils of sight before him, he felt the outside world. He combed through a planet of glass wires to find those that looked at the truth. Words and pain rushed past him in this war. Was he made to be nothing more than a weapon, he wondered. 

He'd been awoken by Dr. Cain and lived peacefully with humans. Then his conscience had told him to protect his new family and friends from Mavericks. He fought. Through fighting he found the lines between his own conscience and the mind of a maverick blurred. Humans died in war, and more were born who knew nothing else. Things were black and white in their short lives. Yet X believed in them. He fought so hard for peace. He found it for a while in Neo Arcadia. He sacrificed his own freedom to lead Humanity back into the light. Then Dr. Weil, and war, again, always war. He'd met so many wonderful humans who didn't want war. So why was he still humanity's greatest weapon, even without his bullet-filled body? 

Zero was his arm now, and the blade it held. Zero went where X told him to go. Zero stayed alive for X. Zero couldn't even remember X, but he'd die for him. X hated it. He wanted peace. He wanted the time to bring Zero's memories back. He wanted none of them to fight, so they could take their time as they remembered and relived their tenderness. He had so many things to tell Zero, but they were heavy things, distracting things; these things that Zero absolutely had to know and that only X could tell him were things that would stop Zero from fighting. Right now, humans and reploids needed Zero to fight.

X wouldn't have time to tell Zero soon. X was tired, he was running short, he was about to burn out as his bits and bytes turned to smoke. Soon his electrical integrity would disassociate and drift away, leaving no pattern of him behind at all, not even radiation on the stones below.

X had to leave the server to talk to Ciel. He oozed from it like a white slug until his body whirled into shape under rainbow rings. He floated up through the base.

"Hey, lil' bro. Kinda hard to find you." There was only one person in the basement hall, a generic reploid in the same green combat suit as all the others. X wasn't quite sure who he could be talking to, though he might have been on the phone, so X decided to float past. The reploid's palm swatted at him, then scooped him out of the air. "I said, hey, little bro."

"Who are you?" X asked, his voice tumbling out of his ball of light.

"You don't remember me? Does everyone down here have memory problems now? I'm undercover, you dweeb."

X paused, thought, placed the voice, studied the reploid's shades and the slice of yellow in his collar. "Blues? What are doing here?"

"I just said I was undercover. I figured Heaven's Army had some crap going on, so I just dressed up. I come in here, and whaddya know, people are talking about how X, the real X, is helping them out. Back up top, in Neo Arcadia, they think that X is sick. And so I think, if everyone knows there's two Zeros, why not two X's. Then I just tracked you down. Good enough?"

"All right, thank you for the explanation," X said as he settled on the disguised Blues' shoulder. He did like explanations. Blues obviously knew that, which meant he was the real Blues. That and the attitude. "The X in Neo Arcadia is a copy of my body made by Ciel. He was corrupted by the duties of his office and lack of experience. He isn't actually me in any way."

"Okay. So what're you doing down here?"

"I'm helping Zero."

"Which Zero?" Blues couldn't help quirking a smirk at his response to X's effusively determined reply.

"The real Zero. There's only one Zero for real, just like there's only one me. The real Zero fights with the resistance. The other one, the one working for Weil, is Omega."

"Omega, huh?"

"Omega was the greatest weapon in the Elf Wars! You were around for that! You all were, on the moon, sending us aid!" If the moon hadn't helped, X's raindow rings shuddered and shattered to think of how many more than 60% of humanity would have died.

"Yeah, I remember, but Omega's a giant mechaniloid. He had the Dark Elf powering him, right? But Omega's just a machine. The other Zero upstairs, he has Weil hacking into him so he can pilot Omega as an armour. And Wily's pretty darn sure the one upstairs is the real deal."

"But he can't be! Yes, he's Zero's original body. The hardware, the muscles. But Zero came back during the Elf Wars. He fought with me against Omega. He was right there at my side, and he was really Zero."

"Was he? Zero's missing Black Box #3 and a memory chunk. That's where his main trace signature relay was. I'm sure he felt like Zero, but was he?"

X shot away from Blues, swirling in anger. "Stop it! You're trying to make up lies."

"Hey, everything I said was the truth." Blues shrugged. "As for Zero being Zero, I mean, that's just speculation."

"Zero is Zero! I know my Zero!"

"Does he act like zero, walk like Zero, quack like Zero, all that? Light wants to know too."

"He woke with hibernation sickness and doesn't have full access to his memories yet. He'd need peace and time for that debug process, neither of which we have. If our father is down here on Earth, maybe he can help Zero."

"Oh boy." Blues had to chuckle at the second mix-up about to happen. "He's helping Dr. Weil right now."

"What?" X felt ready to burst, almost vibrating out of his form. "How can he help that villain?"

"X vouched for him, and you know how Light and Rock are about presuming innocence."

"The _fake_ X vouched for him. And he... he taught me to be trusting too. Father..." X swirled around his own words, trying to come to some sort of conclusion based on Blues' information.

"If you think the fake X is bad now, you should see how he has Zero wrapped around his pinkie finger, lil' bro."

"What do you mean?" The words hurried out of X's light, suddenly stock still.

"Zero thinks he's the real deal, and he just thinks X is sick. He'd do anything for him. Wily says he feels like crap that all he can do to make his X happy is to kill. When his X won't even spend quality time with him. When his X isn't even happy. You know."

"I... I've been..." X bobbed in the air ever lower, his voice failing too. His inner fears began to bubble over into words and falling stars. "I've been so unfair to him, I know. I send him on missions. And he, the guards, the mechs, the people between him and his goals— I make him kill them all. God, I'm horrible! And I don't even— I can't even hold him like this! And when he can't remember me, I can't tell him how much I love him!  
"Blues, I'm horrible! I'm the worst! I'd die for him. I'm _going_ to die for him before this war is over and that's even worse. I don't have enough energy left to support him in battle. I can't even keep enough energy to comfort him looking how I used to. But he never complains. He keeps fighting for me, even when he doesn't remember me. And he's never going to remember me when I'm gone. Which I deserve!  
"I've— I've let the entire world down, an-n-d it's all at war because I made the wrong decisions. I don't des-s-serve someone as g-good as Zero!"

"He remembers you though."

"He..." X paused, thinking of the ways that Zero looked at him, and spoke to him. Did he maybe remember, heart to heart? "His heart does?"

"He remembers everything. The Maverick Wars, first meeting you when Vava was kicking your butt, you being a big jerk to Axl when he first joined, your wedding." Blues crossed his arms, laying the facts into X. "He doesn't remember a century, that's all. But I guess the other zero must remember something too. Wily thinks his love for you has got to be on that black box, real deep, because he found that love copied all over Zero's code. Like some sort of virus. Pff, beats the heck out of the maverick virus, I guess."

"He remembers?" X said hopefully, his rings expanding.

"Yeah, the guy upstairs remembers everything, and he loves you, X."

"The guy up— you were talking about Omega?!"

"Yeah, the real Zero."

"He's not the real zero! Why are you being so horrid, Blues? You're even being a... a... bastard!"

"Wow, who let X swear?" Blues laughed.

"Did you come here just to jerk me around?"

"No, I came here to share the facts with you. I'm not saying the Zero you have down here isn't real. But the one up there is real too. You're making them fight, aren't you?"

"Weil is making them fight."

"Have you tried talking to the one upstairs?"

"You can't talk to Omega. It roars," X explained snidely.

"Funny, the one upstairs talks in full sentences. Wanna give it a try, just for your big brother?"

"No."

"Okay. Have fun being a giant hypocrite who asks other people to always forgive and give second chances. Good to know I'm not alone." Blues, the robot with the biggest daddy issues in the world buried under the biggest garbage dump of pseudo-philosophy, started to walk away with the truth of his own hypocrisy dangling behind him as bait.

X bit. "Maybe I'll talk to Omega, but you have to do something for us!"

"Already am. I'm not taking sides in this."

"How can you not take the side that isn't Weil?" X bobbed after Blues. Blues kept walking faster.

"There's Ciel's side, Weil's side, Harpuia's side, and of course Wily's side. And Bass' side where everything else gets punched, but I think he's the only one there." Blues uncrossed his arms so he could shrug and smirk under his glasses, causing some of his scarf to peek out. "That's way too many sides for me. I'm just gonna go make sure Turbo Man finishes delivering the meds to the Old Residential disaster zone, and then I'm gonna get drunk. You can be nice to the poor guy who loves you or not, up to you. Kanpai, bro." Blues disappeared in the ribbon of his teleporter light.

X hadn't thought he could feel worse. Oh well. Leave it to Blues.

Rock and Lumine ran up through the Jakob Tower, following the black line of charred and broken guards left by copy Zero. When the floor gave away entirely to jagged pits below, the entire area having given way under the copy's savagery, Lumine threw his arms around Rock and floated up the rest of the way despite the strain outside his angelic form. There was only one hallway left. Lumine and Rock both hit the ground and ran at the door. Then they hit the door face first. Rock got right back up to push on the door, still running at it in place. Finally the door recognised a user and opened like a mouth. 

The throne room beyond was in a shambles, but Rock and Lumine couldn't notice it. More hexagonal columns were breaking by the second. Its shuttered window was long destroyed. Starlight and sputtering floor lights framed two winged combatants. The warriors flew around the remaining columns and the disgraced spires of the main throne itself like swallows through bamboo. Their energy shots melted off one another in paint splatters of green and gold. Harpuia and Bass were going at it full force. Rock screamed in frustration.

"Stop it! We're on the same side! Stop fighting," Rock yelled.

"Shall I engage Paradise Lost?" Lumine asked with only a detached interest in the battle. He was visually scanning the room for X-shaped parts. Bass and Harpuia zoomed by with no more than grunts and the flash of weapons.

"Nnno! You two have to stop fighting right now!"

"I saw Harpuia in Heaven's Army!" Bass yelled before turning up into a strafe over the banking Harpuia. Bass' treble boost wings were blown out black already from perfectly aimed burns by Harpuia's blade. Harpuia likewise danced through the air in garlands of orange gutted from him.

"Not by my choice," Harpuia yelled back before springing up to slash at Bass' ankle.

"When I say stop, why doesn't anyone stop?" Rock continued adding to the noise. Part of Bass' ankle-guard fell to the floor. Bass shot Harpuia's stomach since it had presented such a perfect target to him from below. Harpuia shouted but then immediately slashed at Bass' outstretched arm. Bass drew himself back, flying back behind the throne. Harpuia dashed after him in a flurry of blades to parry Bass' trailing energy bullets.

Lumine cupped his hands around his mouth while turning up his vocaliser. "Bass, you're very hot."

"Yeah thanks, goblin," Bass said while poking his head between the upper junction of X's throne. He shot a large blast right above Harpuia, sending down a heavy piece of tiled wall like shrapnel into Harpuia's winged head.

"We're kissing passionately," Lumine continued loudly. "It's very lovely and you're holding me so tight. Ouch. Stop."

"What the heck." Bass looked back up through the throne accusatorily at Lumine. "What are you talking about, Goblin, that crap doesn't work when I'm not kissin' y—" Harpuia clocked Bass directly in the face with the butt of his sword, then used his second blade to decapitate his opponent. Bass head fell to the throne's seat, still yelling.

"Luuu-miii-neee," Rock whined while looking at his currently more horrible husband.

"It solved the problem," Lumine said. He walked over to the throne where Harpuia sheathed his swords.

"Are you with me or against me?" Harpuia asked warily, hand resting just above his fresh and ready hilt.

"Don't hold Bass' violence against us."

"I figured not." Harpuia relaxed.

"I am going to kick both your butts!" Bass screamed. Lumine picked up his head.

"You only have so much battery life as a head," Lumine admonished. "Tell me what happened, succinctly."

"I went back to the base to squash them all on my own, and I see this jerk there, talking with the copy Zero. He was with Heaven's Army this whole time!"

"I was arguing with the copy Zero," Harpuia corrected cooly. "He had taken me to the base against my will. I shortly left. Then Bass assaulted me."

"Was he trying to torture you for information?" Rock asked Harpuia, hands anxiously at his blue vest.

"Aaaaa," Bass interjected.

"No," Harpuia said, "I was there to confront Zero, our Zero. Weil sent him to retrieve—"

"AAaaa."

"Retrieve the Dark Elf in his Omega Armour, aboard a missile for transport. The missile land—"

" _AAAAAA—_ "

"I am putting you into sleep mode," Lumine said, putting a finger in Bass' neck.

"Don't you even da—"

Bass went silent. Lumine had flicked his switch. Harpuia sighed in relief. Rock looked at the guardian in sincere apology.

"The missile landed in a human residential district," Harpuia continued. "That's unforgivable. Zero in Omega was hardly aware. All that thing could do was growl like a beast and fire at me. I was severely injured, but could still escape. Their Zero took it upon himself to transport us both back to his base. Their camp surgeon administered a healing ELF. It was humiliating. I left as soon as their Zero awoke me. Trying to get me to stay with them, what sludge."

"Humans died," Rock said in horror. "How could Dr. Weil do that?"

"I don't understand extremists," Harpuia said, looking at Bass' decapitated body, "no matter which side they're on."

"We have to tell Daddy what an evil man Dr. Weil is." Rock looked between Lumine, Bass' head, Harpuia, Bass' Body, and the bits of blue all around the room. "Harpuia, you can fly and you know the codes to the lab?"

"I'm banned from the tower now," Harpuia grumbled. "I broke into the throne room after I heard of Master X's death, heedless of Bass' pursual. Getting anywhere else will be impossible for me, especially the transport-shielded lab."

"Someone needs to tape up Bass. Someone needs to find X's IC chip and backup drives. Someone needs to warn Daddy." Rock was overcome with indecision and fear.

"If I may: Lumine has lab clearance and can fly, you know how to fix your husband, and I know what to look for in X's remains." Harpuia pointed at each while giving his disguised orders. He stared at the scattered bits of blue around him, and the one broken jewel of red. He grimaced sadly. "After all, he is my daddy."

The Lab was deep underneath Jakob Tower, its modules and halls snaking under the entire city like roots to the tower's trunk. In its deepest reaches, Dr. Weil was actually enjoying Dr. Light's company. He was also disgusted utterly by it. Light was horribly pure and innocent, which made him so fun to deceive. The man had lived as an ELF for ho long, and yet he believed in humanity's goodness to man? He believed in reploids' evolving potential? It made Weil laugh, then tell the supposed joke he'd just been thinking of to cover it. Light as just a reploid himself. He had been a reploid back when he was in a human body. That was the only explanation for how he could be so foolishly inhuman. At least he was good at programming and singing to himself. Weil didn't mind some light background music that he could tell was unintentional.

Thomas found working with Alphonse to be inoffensive and something for which he was uniquely primed. Alphonse was a blowhard about his own work, he thought he was the superior scientist, he ordered others around like they were machines, he pushed his old body to its limits as if age meant nothing, and he was essentially starved for attention. It was like having a very ugly Dr. Wily around. Light had found out by accident that Weil enjoyed his singing, and since then had filled their work hours with soft music. They both worked faster when he was doing so, partly from its euphony, and partly because Alphonse couldn't be monologuing while listening.

Work itself was pleasant. After scratching his head over what basic information on Ciel's power system that she had released to the scientific community, Light had happily agreed to help with the antivirus properties of the Baby Elves. There were moral concerns with their necessary ability to enter and edit reploid systems at whim. Remote control was a scary prospect. Yet, they had to do this to quickly and effectively administer their antivirus into those victims of the Maverick Virus who would run from help. Thomas understood this fully. When the Dark Elf reappeared, he helped patch her up too. He was very pleased at her construction. She could help so many people. Under her protection, like a central immune system, humans and reploids could finally learn to live as equals. Once everyone had been vaccinated, no one would need the Dark Elf or Baby Elves any more. That was the day Thomas dreamt of most.

Now, Zero needed to fit into the Omega Armour. Light understood from Wily's explanation how this fit into the Treble Boost system. He didn't think so lowly of Weil as everyone else did. He seemed like just another vain scientist in a profession full of them. That was a character flaw, but not a mortal sin. Still, Thomas fully intended to keep his promise to Albert: he would hold off installing Zero fully into the Omega Armour until Albert returned with the patch at the end of the day. Thomas was entirely sure he could get the great Alphonse Weil to talk about himself while giving out rapt attention if he needed to stall for time. If things got physical, Thomas had to blush at the thought that his new robotic body could certainly restrain a fully human old man, no matter how many tubes and support struts were attached. Light just didn't want to do that; it'd feel like picking on someone so weak.

Zero sat in the Omega Armour cockpit. The armour itself patched in completely to the lab's mainframe with thick cords, while Zero plugged in only his preliminary wires for diagnostics. Weil couldn't upload anything into Zero's head. Dr. Light thought he probably wouldn't. Zero had piloted Omega to retrieve the Dark Elf, and that had gone smoothly without any evil laughter or sudden property destruction. Zero had gone, then returned. He was quite disorientated upon return. Light agreed with Weil that Zero should be placed into regenerative stasis for the remainder of Omega's preparations. They needed to make sure the connection worked more smoothly, so Zero wouldn't suffer the same shock the next time.

Light was more than happy to work on a programming rewrite to help ease Zero's distress. Even if it meant he had to look through Wily's old Treble Boost code, bringing back bittersweet memories. On the one hand, Bass and Rock ended up getting along, and on the other, Wily had tried to take over the world in cahoots with an alien overlord. It wasn't their best time. He turned his attention back to monitoring Zero's current condition.

"He's moving under the constraints," Dr. Light remarked, "in the facial area. Just his basic form."

"Oh, is he? It must hurt," Dr. Weil said while attaching the next armour port in the admin systems permissions.

"No, I think, I think he's dreaming." Light was happy to relay the news that Zero wasn't in pain.

"He's never done that before," Weil commented with much less care.

"It's normal for Robot Masters and X. Albert must have put it in Zero too. I wonder what he's thinking of?" Light looked at the activity under his scanner, and the faint heat outline of Zero's head wavering. Even though Zero would go to war, he hoped it was a sweet dream.

The dream had no preamble. X appeared before Zero. Zero took a few seconds to take in the sensation. He looked around him, and didn't see much beyond a black mental idea of a "room." He looked to X again. X was there, so they had to be... in Hunter Base? Zero noticed the conference chairs and the table in between himself and X. He saw the city outside. It was night because they were alone. The light stopped being on. X looked really beautiful, as he always did in the faint hint of street neon.

"X," Zero said. He didn't know how else to start.

"Are you Zero?" X asked.

"Of course, it's me, X!" Zero stepped forward, pushing a chair out of his way. His eyes softened in fear. X questioning his identity didn't make sense.

"Aren't you Omega?"

"Omega?" Zero remembered the war. He remembered X in the castle. He remembered Weil. X and Weil were telling him about Omega. "I know the armour was responsible for horrible things during the war, but I was sealed with it in space. Because I asked to be... Oh, X, I'm so sorry I asked myself to be sealed. I left you alone. But I was so dangerous, and I didn't want to hurt you, even though..." Zero continued pushing through the line of chair that seemed to grow between them. He wanted to touch X, but X still looked at him coldly. "Wily says you were always immune though! I didn't have to leave you. I'm so sorry I left you. I'm never going to do that again. I promise."

"Even if you are Zero, you've never been able to keep that promise," X said bitterly.

"I mean it. I love you, X."

The last chair disappeared between X and Zero. Zero held his hand between his chest lights. X could see him like that, in his old armour. That's how this Zero wanted to look. Because this Zero remembered. X's cassock bled away, and he began crying.

"I love you too, Zero."

"Don't cry, X." Zero held X, their armoured chests clanging together as always. He felt their helmets tonk together, earcone first. "You don't deserve to cry. You've been too unhappy lately and it's all my fault. Because I left you."

"It's been so hard without you," X admitted.

"I know what Weil's doing to me now," Zero said, stroking X's back. "But Light will wait for Wily to return. Then Wily will patch me, and Weil won't be able to do anything. I'll be in control of the Omega Armour, not him. I'll use it to power and protect Neo Arcadia."

"The Omega Armour is too dangerous, Zero."

"But if anyone can handle it, it's me, right?"

X looked away.

"Right," Zero prompted.

X blushed, then held Zero close again, cheek nestled between his green lights.

"Right," X affirmed.

"You won't have to worry any more. And then— you promise?"

"Promise what, Zero?"

"You'll let Light fix you? Take away Weil's spell, and your stutter?"

X looked up at Zero. His big green eyes were blank. "Who do you think I am?"

"You're X." That answer was simple to Zero.

"I... where do you think we are?"

"My head."

"That's true." X stepped back. Zero's body immediately ached. He couldn't understand this distance. "But the X in Neo Arcadia's throne, that isn't me, Zero."

"Not you?"

"I sealed away the Dark Elf with my body after you went away. Then you— a part of you— maybe you? I don't even know what to think now. The Zero of the resistance, that Zero, because I told him where to go, he fought Elpizo. The fight destroyed my body. I'm only an ELF now. I've been that way for a long time, and I don't have much energy left."

Zero was horrified. He couldn't even form words. His hands went to X's arms and held fast. He believed what X was telling him. He wished it were a lie. He felt robbed of everything.

"Did I fight with you during the Elf Wars?" X asked in a tiny voice.

"I remember the government awakening me," Zero said slowly.

"Yes?"

"And then they told me I had one last mission."

"Yes!" X held Zero's arms, completing the circuit.

"They sent me onto the battlefield. But you weren't there. I fought many reploids, until two finally sniped me. Then I woke up again in my sealed chamber. Weil forced me into Omega. You were there then."

"Not me," X emphasised.

"The other you?"

"He's a copy of only my body."

"Oh, so that's, ah, that's why he never acted like you."

"Of course he couldn't," X said with a bit of pride in himself to cover the pain of what he'd heard from Zero.

"I'm sorry. I kissed him."

"No, that's okay." X shook his head.

"I held his hand."

"That's okay!"

Zero lapsed into silence in the face of X's yell and the wet eyes that accompanied it. He felt X's hold on his arms tighten, and he loosened his. He wanted X to know how true his devotion was to the right X, the only X for him.

"It's not okay that you were Omega," X said. "That was you. You were Omega. I fought and disabled Omega."

"Oh," Zero said. He bowed his head before trying to look into X's eyes again. X returned his gaze. They felt honesty between them.

"I fought with the other you by my side. He knew how to do Final Strike. He remembered Axl's death. He talked like you. He acted like you. He looks like he does now, with the black eyes and the long diamonds over his ears." X took away one hand to motion around his head in mimicry of the new Zero body. "But he remembered then; he doesn't remember now. Explain to me, please, if you somehow know: how?"

"I don't know." Zero attempted to draw X close. X let him. They stayed in the warm embrace until the first of X's tears finished dripping off of Zero's golden grating to the floor below. "But I think Dr. Wily might be right. Maybe they took my number three black box and memory bank. That part of me, that must be who you fought with."

X nodded, separating from Zero's chest just so he could stare into to sea deep eyes again like before. "Must be."

"They must have removed those parts from him when they sealed him again. So he couldn't be brought back as Zero. Because of... everything I've done."

"That makes sense. But, where could those parts be?"

"They won't be waiting with Light in a capsule."

"Zero!" X slapped Zero's square shoulder. It wasn't funny. or rather it wasn't a time for joking.

"Maybe they destroyed them. I'm okay with that," Zero said seriously.

"You are?" X asked more kindly.

"I think I missed something on the moon," Zero joked again.

"Do you remember Marino?"

"Drawing a blank."

"You were more shocked than me when she turned out to be Signas' daughter. You know, who we both thought was working hard in college?" X smiled, petting Zero's waist.

"I remember her in middle school..." Zero mumbled to the air.

"How long did you miss?"

"It's a clean century wipe."

"Axl died." X stopped petting.

"How?" Zero drew X closer.

"Mavericks overwhelmed him." X paused, hating the memory. "He wanted to go out fighting a big bad..."

"Yeah, he always said that."

"But it was just a wave of them. They c-covered him. His guns overheated, and couldn't fire. They tore him apart. We, we-we cut through them. You and me, t-together, and we got his parts. But the law... newgen reploids, too human..." X sighed. "They wouldn't let us salvage him. His IC chip was too far gone, and they stopped making those parts again. SO he, there was nothing we could do."

"X, I'm so sorry."

X felt Zero's tears hit his helmet. He hugged Zero tighter. "It'll be okay, Zero. We have each other."

"Yeah, I got you, X." Zero cradled X's head. His body felt heavy while he thought. Weil wasn't right, but neither was Heaven's Army. If only X, the real X, could be leading the humans, there really would be a right side. Then, by that logic, the side X was on would be the right one. It became clear to Zero through their slow heavy breathing that he was with X now, and when he awoke...

"You'll be there for me when I awake in Omega?" Zero asked. "Will I have to find you?"

"I'll be with the other Zero, and he'll be looking for you. We'll meet again," X promised. "This won't be the last time. I'm sure of that. My energy can last until then."

"No, here." At the speed of his thought, a pen and paper were there when Zero quickly turned to the table. Zero let go of X with a kiss to the blue robot's head. He started writing; coördinates and directions flew onto the page. "I'll write down just exactly where we are. You won't have to search for me. You can tell him. You can both come right to me."

"Thank you, Zero, but he, we—" X tried to say something uncomfortable, yet even saying we when talking about himself and the copy Zero made the original wince. "I don't know if he has your parts or not, but the Zero I've been, um, helping." X waited for another wince.

"I guess I should be okay if you kissed him," Zero said as if his words were made of grit.

"I thought he was you. Just like you thought the other X was me."

"Y-yeah," Zero admitted. "But did you?"

"There hasn't been time for any of that," X admitted with incriminating regret. "Plus, I'm noncorporeal. He couldn't ever touch me, even in his mind. Appearing in a processor like this, where we can touch," X's hand laid on Zero's, "and we can see each other in a real place, as real people:" X moved Zero's hand to his soft yet truly solid face, "it takes a lot of energy."

"Oh, God, I'm sorry." Zero tried to move his hands away but X stopped him.

"No. I don't regret this. Let's stay this way a little longer." X wrapped both his arms around Zero's shoulders, sealing his proposition with a kiss. Zero's lips moved against his softly, as if afraid to hurt him. They pressed together a few times, then X's lips settled at the side of Zero's neck for the last light touch. His breath followed it, ruffling the hair that spilled out of Zero's helmet. "We have to stop Weil. I'll direct the other Zero to stop him too."

"You'll have me. I'll stop Weil."

"What if you fail? What if Weil takes over? What if Weil controls you with Omega?"

"X. No." Zero's arms tightened around X. "I hate what ifs."

"I know. But."

Zero sighed. "If that happens, get the copy to kill Omega and stop Weil. Then you can put me back together. Just like old times."

X was too emotionally tired to fight off the black joke. He just smiled. "Maybe we can get you to break your bad habit after that. No more dying."

"Promise, babe." Zero Kissed X's earcone.

"I have to go," X said.

"Save your energy. I'll see you soon, X."

Zero felt X kiss his voice box before his warmth fizzled away, and then the dream unravelled.

Wily still smelled like the sea when he sauntered into Jakob Tower. The salt had blown stiffly into his auburn hair when he exited Dive Man's hatch at port. He hadn't yet tamed it. But at least his tight white body-suit wasn't rumpled. Removing his cape when underwater had been the right choice. With a young and handsome reploid body like this, he had to look his best.

Trailing the doctor, Dive Man was at unease. He heard many things wrong around town and in the tower above. "X is dead," Dive man murmured through his pipe right into the reploid Wily's radio receiver.

"What?" Wily stopped walking for a second before continuing in a hurry. "Who killed him? Does Thomas know?"

"They blame Heaven's Army. I don't know about Dr. Light. Harpuia and Bass are fighting above."

"Things certainly did go downhill while we were gone. I'll hurry to the lab, but you follow me just in case." Wily stuck his data pad into his suit's inner pocket then broke out into a run. With elastic muscles, he felt no fatigue. It was so freeing.

The fatigue set in when Wily's core output had to rise to power him through the broken depths of the tower. The fatigue became a problem when Wily heard a horrible roar from below and forced himself to run faster. His nails all but chopped off his bangs when he pumped his arms from waist to head. His heels made no contact with the floor. His calves burned. Why'd he programmed in overexertion sympathetic systems anyway? This was a horrible idea. Oh, great, now he was sweating.

One rapidly closing door ate Wily's cape. Another threatened to eat his leg. The underground was going into lockdown. Wily pushed himself to the maximum, transcending the errors littering his fake body. Omega must have awoken. If he could still launch himself onto the thing, he could hack into it and patch it on the run. It was his last hope to get back at ...Alphonse.

There was only a large launching bay ahead. The ceiling started to open the underground to sky. Wily saw Omega. He saw another Zero slashing at it. As he drew closer, terrible things happened in quick sequence. The small Zero slashed at Omega's power core, detonating it. Weil gloated. A deep purple haze enveloped the room in a cutting storm. Omega's armour rearranged itself into a twisted mountain of misplaced plates and aborted attempts at appendages. Finally, the platform holding it up dropped. Wily jumped. His arms and legs splayed beside him. Omega fell. Wily fell. He brought his arms over his chest to protect the data pad. Omega fell. Wily saw the wall in front of him. In a sick flipping motion, Wily hit the wall face first, bent in half backwards from the recoil, then fell four hundred feet below onto an upturned fragment of the floor with the sad crack of a delicate German spine.


	7. How wearisom Eternity so spent in worship paid

Dr. Wily saw the night sky and dark branches go by above him. He felt his body move forward, and his head ached. He could feel his nose broken. Of course the big thing would take the brunt of the impact. He looked closer at the branches, then identified them as beams and wires in the broken tower. He couldn't move below his power core. He felt Turbo Man rumbling below him. He saw his feet dangling over the passenger-side window. _Oh, alles Gute._

"Old man's awake," Blues' voice said from somewhere behind Wily.

"Zero..." Wily asked after his youngest son, tasting the synthetic blood in his mouth.

"No, _Blues_ ," The oldest son mocked, "you daredevil dolt."

"Accccch..." Wily closed his eyes. "Is Zero all right?"

"Not really. One of them needs to be put back together, and the other's with Heaven's Army."

"Black Box #3?"

"Still in the other guy. We searched the entire facility. The copy Zero's sending out its signal anyway. You've been out a long time, pops."

"Papa," Wily corrected. No response came. He covered his forehead with one arm, finding the other less mobile. His eyes fluttered back open. Turbo Man turned a corner into a covered hall. The car robot stopped. "How's Thomas?"

"Still out," Blues said. Blues smacked the wall. An elevator light went on.

"I have him, Dr. Wily," Dive man said. Wily couldn't exactly sit up to check, but he trusted him.

"Where's everyone else?"

"Junk Man and I are here," Wood Man's gentle voice said. "We'll take the next lift. Rock and the others are up in the shuttle bay."

The elevator arrived. Turbo Man drove inside. Blues punched in for the top. They began to rise.

"We're going back to the moon?" Wily asked, starting to feel dim. The tower's girders rose around their glass cage in a soporific rhythm that sent a shadow across Wily's shins at each spotlight.

"Yeah, doc. Gate's got a lot of work," Blues said.

"All so." They were headed back home, and the reploid doctor would rebuild them. They were running away, and it was a very good strategy. Wily liked running away. He felt his eyes sink heavily. He could sleep again. It would be fine. Screw Earth.

Wait, Harpuia was talking. There was Fefnir's chest. Okay, everyone's getting on the ship. There's Rock. He's upset. Blues? What about X? Wait, what are they saying about X and Zero? Suici... no... can't sleep n...

Junk Man and Wood Man had never felt so much pressure. Blues led them through the underbelly of Neo Arcadia past the utterly destroyed bodies of guard droids and the desolation of both technology and nature laid in the wake of the copy Zero. Above, Weil's soldiers scrambled under his control. Their footsteps and clinging fingers drilled down through two centuries of human neglect, aiming at the same abandoned lab where the robot masters were headed as well. It was a matter of time, but not because of hijacked guards. Blues had them racing against X's empathy.

All three of them saw the light ahead above restless green waters. Butane tanks had already caught the walls of the room on fire. Plastic was starting to melt onto the prone bodies below. Harpuia, Fefnir, and Leviathan melted into the floor like wax. The Omega Armour's shell had been blasted free of paint, left as a broken vessel for four bright carnelian hex-pods buried in black smouldering scrap. Yet in the centre of the room, under a chandelier of jagged broken glass and frayed wires, the last remnants of the copy Zero's womb, was a true light.

Blues ran to the light, yelling, "X, don't!" The light expanded and pushed him down to the ground a metre away.

"Crap," Blues spat into the rubble. "Junk Man, hack the room. Wood Man, release the bats!"

The light grew again and spun faster. Blues could see white numbers ever so faintly racing across it, words and circuits, and the bright shadows of ghostly servos within. Blues stood. He had to get closer.

"X, listen to me. You don't need to fix him all the way. We'll take care of his body." There was no response. "X, you'll kill yourself! GOD!" Blues threw his broken glove to the ground. The sound of its clatter barely registered above the loud hum of X's frenzied ELF body.

"I can't hack the room," Junk Man said.

"Get the wires—" Blues spun around to order, where he saw Junk man pulling at the walls and twisting together leads into his head like a nest of dreadlocks. Batontons hovered with furious wings in a geodesic pattern around X's sphere. Wood Man was working to connect each to Junk Man's head over the outdated but unmelting wires. The sphere started to dim. Blues ran over to Junk Man, pulling on some of the leads connecting to the Robot Master's head so he could hook them up to the batontons himself.

"Are we hooked up?" Blues yelled when he saw the net finalise around the batontons. Blues could see the core of X's Elf under the sphere of shadow. He was flickering and his rainbow bands were still.

"We're good," Junk Man said. His body lit up at every input port and his power core ran to taxing limits.

"The batontons are ready," Wood Man said, his hands within the dome's energy sphere and his cypress-carved body starting to char.

X materialised. In the small world that only he and Zero had, he was spending the last of his energy to speak aloud, in a form that could be touched, could be loved. Zero's body was fully repaired, but none of it moved. Zero's eyes were barely alive. X mouthed words. Zero's eyes shone; his mouth parted. X wavered, his edges fuzzy and his face crying above his kindest smile. X flickered. X fractured. X pulled apart. X dimmed.

X had let go.

Blues didn't need to scream for the process to begin. X had no energy left to continue. His data laid in the air, encoded only in the trace magnetism of every particle he had touched. Wood Man drew his hands together. The batontons' wings met and locked together. The black dome collapsed onto the trapped air below. Signals rushed into Junk Man. Junk Man's body burgeoned with added servers of every size, all converted to one massive solid state drive. Bit by bit, switch by switch, the states of every particle wrote themselves inside of Junk Man. He barely had enough room. Wood Man could sense it. Wood Man opened up his chest, and as his inner resins caught fire, he plugged his direct transfer cable into Junk Man's last port. X's data flooded into him from his batonton's delicate sensors. The two robot Masters couldn't hold any more. The empty dome collapsed in a bang of imploding air.

Blues stood over all the fallen bodies, and his sunglasses were too fogged to see. Following their shrill signal, Blues picked up the canisters inside of Omega's fallen body.

"Shadow, can you get these back to the ship? I have to get these bolt-brains back to the tower before Weil does." Blues held out one canister. A dark hand took it. The rest of the canisters disappeared. Blues picked up Fefnir's overgrown arm and hoisted it over his back. He was glad to hear Turbo Man's rumble approaching. There was way too much cleanup to do.

The moon's dark side was white as ever. Mets landed there with their comets and asteroids, eager to mine for water. Their liberated ice rumbled over conveyor belts and slowly melted into the warm atmosphere of the Elysium Colony where tumbling rivers fed rich forests. The humans and reploids of Elysium worked together to tend to their patch of reclaimed Earth, under the guidance of Director Lumine. The director had returned from Earth with more refugees. Some of them were even famous. The people of Elysium wondered if Earth would ever be safe again. But just as Dr. Light urged them, they never gave up hope.

At Elysium's centre, the ragged, broken top of the Jakob Tower held up the colony's dome and housed the Reploids who worked hard to let life be so easy for everyone. In a stairstep of white rooms, Elysium's reploid reclamation centre rehabilitated the broken bodies who came in from below. Maybe it was an urban legend, but people said Dr. Gate, the genius of reploid reconstruction, could even save a reploid who had burned up in a satellite crash. Gate was busy saving the new refugees. The lights of his white slice in the tower's side were on nonstop for the past months.

"It's really a physics problem, Tom," Albert Wily said while tapping at the computer in front of him. The data from X's retrieval sat there in an endless cascade of spreadsheets. His back didn't even hurt from where it had been completely broken. The only thing that hurt was his head, in a psychosomatic way, because Tom was trying to make things more complicated, as usual. "You could make a program to collate all this, but if I just build a machine to reverse the data retrieval system, it'll build his ELF back how it was, granted we'll put it in an energy rich environment so he can reconstitute himself, but— are you listening?"

Thomas looked away from the window, stroking his deep brown beard. "Oh. Yes."

"So you agree with my proposal?" Wily swivelled in his chair. One long leg in white silk slacks crossed another. His supported foot tapped in annoyance, the teal sock peeking in and out from his desk. Wily's arms were already crossed over his powder blue vest and indigo cravat. His long skull-embroidered lab coat poured out to the rush-woven floor below.

"I still think that we should incorporate X's original data," Light said, "to see what we need to debug along the way, then add on from there to match his subsequent updates."

"We can debug him later. Don't you think it's more important to preserve his state faithfully, without reëngineering him along the way? Something about all your diatribes concerning personhood? We should take our time reconstituting X."

"That's easy for you to say when you _have_ your son," Light grumbled.

"I'm... I'm sorry," Zero apologised from the doorway.

"Gentle Jesus! How long have you been there?" Light asked, blushing deeply as he just about jumped a foot from the ground despite Gravity Man's influence on the entire colony.

Zero's hair was freshly wet, and the lines of his plating folded under his thin white undershirt. His long black sweatpants had tiny geckos and bobcats on them. His toes were naked underneath. He hovered in the doorway, afraid to enter the lab, and more afraid to look at the giant screen full of X's numbers.

"I didn't hear anything," Zero said too quickly, "and Roll sent me here to remind you to sleep."

"Oh. Sleep," Wily commented, leaning his head back over his chair. Behind him, Thomas and his burgundy suit were upside down. "I guess we've been forgetting that."

"Do you want to look at X," Light asked.

"No. It can wait. Until he's done," Zero said.

"Are you sure?" Wily asked upside-down Zero. "His body's finished. That was the easy part."

"Yeah, I know." Zero's eyes kept flashing over to the glass recharge container across the room. He knew exactly what was there. He'd snuck in almost every night to stare at X's dead sleep. It wasn't creepy. Zero dragged his ponytail over his shoulder. "Anyway, it's 22-hundred. I'm going to train. But Roll'll probably push you both into a recharger if you don't shut down here."

"Right, right." Wily righted himself, then stepped out of the chair. He stretched as he walked to the door. "I won't say no to a break. Come, Tom."

"Not tonight," Tom rejoined.

"Isn't he fun when he's overtired?" Wily winked at Zero, arms still over his head and cufflinks twinkling in the clinical lights.

"I didn't hear anything," Zero repeated. He waited until both of the old doctors had left. He waited until the lights went off automatically. He didn't want to move from the doorway until there was no one left to see him sink so low.

Zero moved so slow that the lights wouldn't detect his motion. Every tiny shift in his plating brought him closer to X's body. It looked just like he always had, minus a few scars, Light's work clear. But it lay there under glass, without even the soft movement of sleep. X wasn't ready yet. He'd heard the doctors argue about how to bring his mind back. Zero missed him so much. He was far past blaming himself for becoming Omega. He didn't care about his copy still running around below. He wanted X back, the real X, his X. He didn't even need X's data put in the body lying before him at that point.

Zero could be happy to go to sleep and see X there in his dreams. X would feed into him from a server, living in electronic pulses. They'd share a reality in Zero's mind, just like they had in Omega the last time. Zero would be okay with that, just as he was okay with losing part of his memory. It was called desperation.

Reality told him that he shouldn't deny X the chance to live outside a computer. His desires right then were unfair to X and what X wanted. But didn't X always get what he wanted? Hadn't Zero always sacrificed himself for X? Yes, yes, and yes, because he loved him. Zero couldn't bear loving X so much.

More than that, he couldn't bear seeing the other X. The other X had deceived him. Yet because that X had been, like him, easy to reässemble, he got to live when the real X was still stuck in limbo. That X got to walk through the gardens of Elysium, and speak to the people, and try to find his place in the new world. That X got to hug Dr. Light when his reäcclimation turned difficult, and he got to receive sweet congratulations from the guardians who had worked under him blindly for so long. That X was a parasite living the real X's life. He always had been.

"What are you doing here, Cuckoo?" Zero asked. His Deep blue eyes shot up to the copy X in the doorway like a bullet.

"I wish you wouldn't c-call me that," the copy said. His red eyes shone almost as bright as his head jewel.

"Do you like 'Copy' better?"

"What if we got along? You used to like to kiss me."

"Do you want someone to kiss you?"

"Maybe you." Copy X clung to the doorway as if its gentle moulding was a warm shoulder.

"Never in a million years. I wish they'd reformatted you as a mettaur. You have to work off all the evil you've done."

"All right. Bye, Zero." Copy X turned away. He knew the argument wasn't worth pursuing. It left them both angry and sad. He'd done what he thought was right for Neo Arcadia. He was working for Elysium now.

His life was hard. Zero wasn't the only one hurting. His life had been terrible since Rock had argued to bring him back. Because he was his own person, Rock said, and deserved to live his own life. It wasn't living to get trained in a million jobs he had no aptitude for, just to find one he'd be slightly good at. No one took his orders. The guardians tried to cheer him up, but they were faking it, he knew. They didn't call him Master X any more. No one knew what to call him, so he was you, or intern, or buddy, or dude, or a list of insults from Zero. Copy X hated it.

Light was worse. He treated copy X like a child. He wanted to bond. Copy X didn't ask for a father. Or two. He didn't think of Ciel as his mother. He didn't want a peppy brother who told him he'd find a place. He was himself, and he wanted to live the purpose he'd been made for: ruler of Neo Arcadia. But it burned on the Earth below him. Weil was destroying it. Everyone was dying. He could see sickening details from the telescopes, where city blocks were painted in grey and seeping red. The farm districts were burnt-out battlefields. He had nothing to go back to.

Copy X went back to his bed. He'd pushed everything else out of the bedroom. The general room outside that door was cluttered with tools and protective gear from jobs he'd failed at. His bedroom had a bed that didn't judge him. It had a picture, courtesy of Freeze Man, pinned to the ceiling showing a resting Zero. His Zero, the one who'd killed him. That Zero hated him for who he was, not who he wasn't.

That Zero knew him. He knew that Zero. If they met again, they'd probably try to kill each other. That was fine. The Zero back in the lab had a dead boyfriend; Copy X's Zero was still alive, cutting people up down below on Earth. They'd meet again, and then his boyfriend would put him out of his misery. That's the only way Zero would pay attention to him. That's the only way they could be together. Copy X was fine with it.

"Go ahead, Zero, end me. I don't want to live any more." Copy X growled at the picture above him. He glared at it while his recharge sequence started. Yet the edge of sleep, he admitted he very much wanted to live.

"I'm pretty sure that's not healthy," Axl said.

Zero looked up from X's resting place. The room's lights were still off. Axl had completely snuck up on him. That was annoyingly Axl.

"Don't you care about X?" Zero said.

"Course I do. I'm just not gonna stand around being sory for myself. When X comes back, then we can celebrate. And he'd want us to be ready to be happy until then, eh."

Zero sighed. He closed his eyes. What Axl said was right. He should be working to make X wake up sooner, not pine after him like this. Zero opened his eyes. Axl wasn't there. Of course he wasn't; everyone Zero loved was gone.

The next morning, the lights went on when Shadow Man came in with a large box, not even trying to be stealthy. Zero and Shadow looked at each other. Shadow put the box down, carefully bending his digitigrade legs in his ninja gear. Chastisement was written all over his black-wrapped face.

"You're watching him. That's creepy," Shadow said.

"You're an alien. You don't know creepy," Zero said.

Shadow hopped instantaneously over to the computers to turn them on for the doctors. X's data pulled itself back onto the screen, ready to be interpolated. Zero looked away, back to X below the glass. X was absolutely beautiful in the morning light. Zero could swear he saw the bright rosy shadows paint a smile on his still face.

"You know, we have a saying on my homeworld."

"What's that." Zero tried to make the words sound like "go away."

"All hail Sunstar, and all hail our beloved general Terra."

That got Zero to look up. "What?"

"It must be a colloquialism local to my unit." Shadow started to undo the box he'd carried in. "We speak a very context-heavy language. But I believe its semantic meaning translates to: stop feeling sorry for yourself and making everyone around you miserable because you miss him, and start living to honour his memory instead, especially since he's not really dead, you bolt-brain."

"Very contextual," Zero growled. Shadow could only get away with hat because he was Blues' lapdog. More like that translation was just Blues sending a message.

Shadow drew a capsule out of the box. "I have been grave robbing."

"Is that another contextual saying?"

"No," Shadow responded primly, "I have been grave robbing." Shadow held out the capsule. Zero took it. It was covered in blocky Cyrillic letters. Something about it seemed very familiar. "This will make you feel better."

Zero turned the metal capsule around in his hands. It was heavy. It had electrical charge, potent energy, and it sent out a piercing radio signal. Zero looked up to Shadow, then back to the box between them, shocked.

"Axl?"

Shadow Man bowed, then indicated the box with an outstretched arm. "I'll leave the rest of the box to you, Mr. Zero. Bright Man and Mr. Gate will be in shortly to guide the Cossack bot's reconstruction."

Zero held Axl's Black Box #1 tight to his chest as Shadow Man disappeared.

Two weeks later, Zero implanted the last pigment cell into the freckle to the top left of his scar. It was a place hidden by helmet and hair that only three people knew existed, and only three cared to remember. Zero didn't know why Dr. Cain had chosen to give his last son freckles, but they were Axl, and so Zero followed the bicentennial pattern all the same. With the cosmetics done, Zero placed Axl into an undersuit and placed his reconstituted helmet so it snapped perfectly into place over his earcones and sapphire blue forehead jewel.

The young reploid laid on Zero's work table, framed by bright golden earthlight. They were given this time alone before the whole moon could celebrate Axl's reawakening. Still he slept, silent and unmoving like a doll that Zero had constructed. The gap between his porcelain teeth peeked through between his parted strawberry lips. He was beautiful and rough and awkward all at once, a dark Rembrandt sitting in a college dorm. Zero forced his fingers through the bottom of Axl's helmet, through his copper hair, through his deep ruddy skin, through his spinal column, until they found his well protected switch. Zero pressed the lever upward. It clicked into place.

Axl's chest alit first. Deep inside of him, his power core came to life at the first beckon of his processor, that first signal powered by the mechanical force of pushing his switch. Quickly, like tides filmed in speedy time-lapse, his processor bubbled to life. Axl's eyes onlined, his body twitched, and then he was utterly still while his head whirred louder than it would have to for years. Axl began breathing. His cooling pulse began to rise. He saw the ceiling above him, but screamed.

Axl shot upward, and almost off of the table if Zero hadn't caught him. His legs kicked violently as his twisting abdomen. His forefingers crooked inward rapidly, over and over. Then, dawnlike, he realised where he was. He looked to Zero, face still shot by fear.

"They're gone?" Axl said.

Zero drew him into a true hug. "They're gone," Zero confirmed.

"Where are we?" Axl melted into the warmth. His hands calmed.

"This is my room," Zero said.

"Doesn't look like it."

"We're on the moon."

"Oh."

Axl appeared to think this over, looking straight at Zero. Zero smiled warmly. He'd missed that scratchy voice.

"So where's X?" Axl asked.

Zero's face fell. Axl noticed.

"What's wrong? Zero, is X okay?"

"He's not repaired yet," Zero snapped.

"Oh, sory." Axl started to scoot away towards the window.

"You don't need to be sorry." Zero grabbed Axl's hands. "It's just... X."

"I guess the swarm of mavericks got him too." Axl brought his feet up onto the table so he could put his head between his knees. "That's grody."

"It's actually been a long time, Axl."

"Eh?" Axl looked up.

"When X wakes up..." Zero centred himself around that promise. "He can tell you everything. He's better at that. For now, we have each other."

It took Axl a while to respond. He'd obviously been out a _long_ time. X wasn't here. Zero was all broken up. So, they needed each other. What was new? "Yeah, partner."

Axl put his fist out for a bump. Zero obliged. Axl giggled, then leant forward until he had the leverage to pounce. He landed atop Zero, pinning the older reploid to the floor with a hug and a nuzzle under his chin.

Axl was less than useless when trying to retrieve X's data. While Wily and Light bickered about which approach to use, and then the specifics of it, and then finally the æsthetics of it when they'd run out of anything else, Axl did his best to get in the way or make stupid suggestions. At least that's how the doctors described it when they finally kicked Axl out of the lab. Axl said something about blah blah maybe you want me to stand in a corner like Zero so you can use me as a toolbox, blah blah mooning over X, blah. Zero didn't take any of it as an insult because Axl was Axl, and he supported kicking Axl out of the lab again because Axl was Axl. Axl belonged outside doing something or everything at once.

Once released into Elysium Colony, Axl ran free around the narrow streets, emerging forest paths, scalloped paddy edges, and through everyone's jobs. He naturally avoided the idea that he had to get a job himself, or rather a set purpose to his everyday life. He insisted he was still a Maverick Hunter. The duties of a Maverick Hunter who showed up to help citizens in need turned out to be amazingly like that of a courier.

"It's fine. You're like Quick Man. His job is being Quick Man." Rock had said that earlier in the night while Axl was beginning to repair an old toaster. Now that the job was almost done, and Axl was hanging over the back of Rock's couch with the heavy cube in his hands balancing his chest jewel on the very edge, he was still thinking about it. The idea of robots being created for jobs, and the idea of going maverick as rebelling against one's purpose, and the idea of going maverick at will just to attain freedom... it was a black sea of questions where he could never seem to find shore. The thoughts drowned his brain. He stared deeper into the artificial pond just two feet under and beyond his hands. The toaster rippled in a silver reflection between bladed iris leaves.

"Axl, are you finished with that?" Rock asked while hurrying from one side of the room to the other.

"This?" Axl broke out of his trance. "Yeah, just aboot." As he looked back at Rock, he almost lost his balance. He fell forward over the couch edge, but caught himself by the toes just as the toaster dipped into the water below. Axl looked at the reflection's broken silver circles spread out into the pond. Then he saw another reflection behind him. Axl flopped into the couch and drew the toaster to his chest with a look of shock.

"I wanted to know if I could bring it with me to the safety meeting. Axl?"

"X!" Axl shouted and pointed behind Rock to the doorway.

"Where?!" Rock turned around faster than a whirlwind.

"Oh my god, I can't believe you're back; why didn't Zero comm me; what happened to you?" Axl launched from the couch at the familiar figure slouching into the doorway, but Rock caught him by the elbow.

"That's not X," Rock said.

"What?" Axl stopped trying to accelerate, but wrest his arm from Rock.

"This is the copy X."

"Eh. Oh." Axl's face fell into disappointment. The stranger's face was X's. His body was just about X's too, but wearing some sort of funny dress. Axl saw the red eyes, matching crimson to the forehead jewel. But the face still looked so much like X. "I'm Axl."

"Hello," the copy X said. He was aware from Zero's admonitions that he was supposed to know the red-head in front of him. He wondered where the scar came from.

"Copy X, I'm really sorry I can't talk right now," Rock said, checking all of his suit's pockets for something apparently elusive. "I really want to. You know, I'm always open for a talk. Just not, exactly, right now. I need to get to the public safety meeting, and then over to Heat Man's in time for the new smelter inspection, and then I'm supposed to look at, agh!" Rock drew his hand from his inner jacket pocket. There was a little mousetrap clamped onto it. "Axl!"

"S-sor-y..." Axl tried to look innocent and bashful at once. Rock snapped the trap off of his hand and handed it to Axl, not even judging in the moment.

"I don't even know how long the public safety meeting will last, and they've only invited the tower..." Rock weighed out his schedule, hopping from the balls of his feet to his heels. "But they invited me."

"Yeah well what's so great about a meeting anyway? Meetings are the worst," Axl said.

"The humans want someone there who knows the Elysium law code, and they want to talk about a neighbourhood watch, I think? But they don't even have crime! That's the whole point." Rock crossed his arms and huffed. With just as much affected dejection, Rock uncrossed them and headed to the door. "But if I'm late getting there, I'll completely miss the smelter so..."

"Wait, sir?" Copy X spoke up again, spreading out his body and limbs to fill the doorway despite the nervousness in his core. Rock stopped before colliding with him. "What if I went to the public safety meeting?"

"You went?" Rock asked.

"We look v-very alike. And I'm a reploid from the tower, which is the enti-entity they invited. And furthermore, I happen to be an expert on Elysium's legal code." Copy X tried not to hold onto the door frame too tightly.

"Hey, problem solved!" Axl said. He walked over to the near doppelgängers, with a smile bouncing in his step. "I can come with him to make sure he doesn't get in trouble."

"He won't get in trouble," Rock said to dismiss that doubt, "but you're sure this isn't, you know, deceit?"

"If I'm the one you sent," Copy X said clearly, "then I'm the one you sent."

Elysium's town hall sat in the middle of a thick green square, lush with more wildflowers than grass, and flanked by beech and willow. Humans filed into it on foot from their homes. Copy X felt at peace watching the humans assemble and wait. Axl had already abandoned after half an hour of nothing happening. Now Copy X stood next to the line of chairs where the community leaders sat. It was amazing how quickly humans filed themselves into ranks just like preprogrammed robots. Robots were, after all, meant to be like humans.

The certainty of that fact did not help ameliorate the empty feeling around Copy X's head where a helmet should have been. Wearing plainclothes, with his matted gold hair free, was not something he had ever, ever done. He hadn't even been aware he was a blond. Ciel never had been all that creative. Blaming her for his discomfort, copy X centred himself with petty spite.

The debate about public safely quickly arrived at a unanimous conclusion from the community. "The point is: reploids are supposed to protect humans."

"I'm certain that the robot masters and reploids of Elysium are doing their utmost to maintain the security of our colony and all its life forms," Copy X said smoothly.

"You protect us from asteroid strikes," a woman said, "and from an invasion from Weil's army on Earth, but what about problems that won't end the world?"

"What do you mean?" Copy X put concern into his voice.

"What about robbery? What about murder?"

"There have been no murders in Elysium," Copy X assured them.

"I still don't know what happened to my watch," said a man from the crowd. "And last time I saw it, I was at the dance right here. But it didn't turn up anywhere in the building. What do we do about thieves?"

"What about home robbery?" Someone else said. "It hasn't happened yet, but it could."

"Do you suspect that any one of you would st-t-teal from one another?" Copy X questioned with true concern. "Can you turn to the p-people around you and say that they would break-k into your home and steal from you?"

"What about robots?" Another person said. "We've given them all free will. So they could do anything."

"That would be m-maverick behaviour," Copy X explained, "Which has been rendered m-moot by the antivirus. There can be no mavericks."

"What about those old type robots?" An elderly voice filtered in from the back. "What about the Robot Masters? I heard all about them from my mother. Before the maverick virus, human robots went bad."

"That was—" Copy X swallowed his words. He was now in a precarious position. If he told the truth, that Dr. Wily had been behind most of that, Elysium's hallowed founders would be hell-bound instead, and of course he'd be spitting in the face of the man who'd repaired him. If he said that the Robot Masters had rebelled of their own free will, that would lead to direct robot versus human conflict, which was the opposite of everything Elysium stood for.

"Well, what about the old type robots?" The first woman asked.

"Humans have nothing to fear from any humanoid robot in Elysium."

"He said humanoid!" A man proclaimed his gotcha moment,

"I said humanoid because of course any idiot can get in an accident by misusing industrial equipment and ignoring safety standards." Copy X raised his voice. Suddenly the room was quiet and still before him. First he felt fear. He could have turned them all against him. He wasn't allowed to lose his temper when he was just another citizen. Then he noticed that everyone was listening. He lowered his voice to its regular public speaking level. "Everything we've made is to help humans. The Robot Masters especially are the legacy of Dr. Light and Dr. Wily's dream for a future where robots would serve humanity in every part of life, during peace, during worry, and during disaster. But their original hardware was easily hacked and reprogrammed by greedy humans who wanted to hurt each other. Just like a ride armour, humans piloted the programming of robot masters. Humans hurt one another. But we're not going to do that, any of us. We are Elysium."

"But what about accidents?" A young woman near the front asked in a voice that seemed afraid to break the silence.

"Accidents, well, we have disaster relief teams for that," Copy X said.

"No, smaller accidents," the young woman said. "What if you lose track of time and stay out past curfew? What if someone lost a watch? What if two people get into a fight, where no one wants to really hurt someone else, but they got angry enough anyway? What about making too much noise in the middle of the night? What if a prank gets out of hand, like the clotheslines the other day? What about bullying?"

"So, um, petty crimes. The only one of those we have on the books for punishment is assault. Do you want the tower to come up with more laws for regular infractions?"

"I think you can talk most of those things out," one of the community leaders said while nodding to herself. "We don't need new laws, really."

"Well, what do you want?" Copy X put out his hands, searching the air as if it had a clue.

"We wanted a community watch," another leader said, stroking his moustache, "but the planning for it would require a reploid."

"If you need a reploid to help..."

"We have too many things to do already," said another man. "We should have a reploid do this for us."

"One who doesn't already have a job," agreed the woman next to him.

"Aren't you the reploid who's been bouncing between shops in the town?" said a man in the crowd. "The one who couldn't be a weaver, or a baker, or a paper guy, _or_ a plumber, _or_ a mechanic?"

Copy X shrank at every word. He had to sputter more than talk. "Y-y-ye-e-s."

"Why don't you do it?"

"M-me?" Caught off-guard, copy X could only point to himself. Surely they didn't want him to try another job. The outcome where he would return to Jakob's Tower to draft a slew of new infarction penalties was far superior, and relevant to his interests, than the idea of being a flatfoot.

"Yeah you. You know what we want you to look out for. You know the robot laws, and you can probably run as good as the stripe boy."

"You mean Axl."

"The one with the stripes who delivers our sugar to the pastry shop," another person in the crowd confirmed. "You can make sure he does it on time for once."

A few people laughed. Copy X found himself smiling weakly with the crowd, but his red eyes were still wide from worry.

"I think the director has other plans for me," Copy X demurred.

"Robots work for humans, don't they? Do it," an old man croaked from the front row.

"I'll have to get official permission from the director or sub-director," the copy said, sure that this would finally free him, at least temporarily, from this horrid idea.

"Yeah that's a go." Axl's voice came from behind copy X. The younger reploid spun his head around and then up to see Axl hanging from the scaffolding like a bat, one heck of a grin on his face. "Just talked to Roll. She gave permission."

Copy X stood slack jawed. The humans were cheering, distantly. Faintly, he felt some heavy coat fall on his shoulders, then a brimmed hat atop his head. Another person looped a belt around his waist as he stood so conveniently still, yet staring. A little girl pinned something to his shirt that glinted copper. Axl's mouth was laughing. This was a set-up.  
High up in the tyrian tower, nestled in its jagged, white, ever-shining eye, one more light went on. The carbon fibres fizzled with anticipation, relief, fatigue, closure. The steel beams sighed. The new light flickered. And all the other lights went out.


	8. to Whom we spite.

X served his time in the narrow abyss of the lunar server. There were no mile long windows with stained glass hands to reach the outside world. He had only his carefully curated thoughts to run him through silicon pathways over and over again. The war was ever present, dogging him with doubt as he ran in place through a cold sea of wiry asbestos. He knew he wasn't moving, but he felt himself running ever faster through stinging bladed air. He could feel his legs move, and could feel his internal mechanisms grind against the sand being poured into them, and he could see things vividly even as the cameras of his eyes felt tired and sticky from overuse. He couldn't sleep; he had to run. X had eternity to remember his mistakes, and see the doors close on every chance he'd missed, and relive deep inside every moment the last memory he'd committed as a sin. He'd left Zero alone.

The deep oppressive sea froze in time. Above X, the waters brightened into green, then yellow. The bright sea parted like cotton under the painfully cold sun. He felt his whole body squeezed horribly from inside and out. Then there was one last sensation sent to his processor, riding relays just ahead of a command before it split off into the sensory processing program. The sensation felt like a button switched in the back of his neck. He had just enough time before the command found its match in his operating system's most basic code to know that he had been switched off.

Reboot was meant to feel like waking up. X supposed he'd never know what waking up really felt to a human, but just like humans he experienced different levels of wakefulness after shutdown. The current level was battle ready just under safe-mode crisis immediate. Or it should have been, based on how very awake he knew he was, yet X had to ensure he was in fact awake via internal diagnostics. He was quite sure he was dreaming based on seeing Zero.

Despite an electric mind, it took X several seconds too long to follow logic to the conclusion that he was awake and alive (diagnostics plus streaming sensory data as opposed to discrete triggered memories) and on the moon (the room's architecture plus the earth visible in the sky outside the window) and with a real Zero (the real Zero looking at him as if he were about to break). X looked around him in a full range of motion, gesticulated his hands and arms, then fixated fully on Zero when he was sure everything was totally real. That's when Zero finally smiled, and his warm fingers left the back of X's neck. X felt them slip out past sputtering skin with a slight heat on his cheeks. Zero had literally turned X on, and of all the things he could think at that moment, X could only think of the pun. X held his stomach laughed.

"X, are you okay?" Zero asked, his hurried and hushed tone overly worried. X's palm pushed away Zero's hand just as it aimed for his forehead.

"No, I'm fine. I'm fine, Zero."

"I'll never leave you again, I promise," Zero growled. Zero's whole body rushed forward and his arms caged X in steel. X felt wetness brush against his earcone, and was happy. Zero was allowed to cry, after everything. Zero could cry with him, here, where no one would know.

They kissed. Zero held X's hips tight to convince himself the deep and loving kiss was really happening, and not a dream within Omega. X reacquainted himself with Zero's heat and softness, moving his lips tenderly against Zero's. Zero withdrew, and X chased his lips. Zero let X catch them again, unable to resist his passion. Finally, as X's fingers dug into his shoulders, Zero pulled back to end the kiss fully. They both breathed heavily, venting out the heat that had rapidly filled their bodies. Zero licked his lips. X bit his and blushed hard.

"Miss me?" Zero asked.

X doubled over himself and covered his mouth with a hand to stifle laughter. "Gee, Zero!"

"What?"

"Of course I did." X took a deep breath and lowered his hand from his mouth. X found he was the one about to cry now. "I j-just... missed... I love you s-so much Zero, you, Zero, really Zero."

"Yeah. I'm really Zero."

"Don't make me worry about you again." X melted onto Zero's chest, hooking his chin over Zero's shoulder.

"Promise." Zero pet X's back, soothing both of them into a grateful embrace. Even if he couldn't keep his promise, Zero truly meant every emotion behind it. X meant everything to him, and he knew from the soft hum of X's field that X felt the same way about him.

The Jakob Towers westerly secondary admin elevator had stopped between floors with a sudden crunch. Pushing buttons did absolutely nothing.

"Uggh, I can't believe I'm not going to be there when X wakes up!" Axl shouted, then kicked the wall of the ancient elevator.

Rock and copy X looked at each other, sighing with their irises.

"If anyone should be complaining, it's me, loaded down with this ridiculous equipment," copy X said. A bag full of heavy clothing and a thick tablet intended for criminal records wasn't actually cumbrous, but offset that with tedium.

"You can put it on the floor," Rock suggested.

"Shoes go on the floor," copy X said.

"Yeah, that's what Lumine would say too," Rock said, tapping again at his earcone.

Copy X took Rock's comparison as half an insult: he respected Lumine's commitment to law and order, but he also didn't trust the director, and didn't like being compared to that snob. He also didn't like being forced to be an on the beat cop who'd have to wear a ridiculously spangled military uniform, but the people had decided it —and had made the matching cloak and hat and badge— and as their ruler he was ultimately servant to their will. The great philosophers of the middle kingdom which were imprinted on his data core agreed on this interpretation. Copy X decided that remaining in stately quietude suited his current detached contemplation, in exactly those words. He stared at the ceiling lights reflected in the elevator's brass banister.

Meanwhile, X had found the outside world inaccessible while Axl kicked the wall a second time. "Why won't he pick up?" Rock asked aloud, tapping yet again at his earcone and then neck.

Axl kicked the wall a third and final time, managing to dislodge the locked panel under the navigation array.

"It's because the private elevators in the Noah Corporation suite of systems are lined in alternating layers of conductors. All Faraday-cages. The only way out is the main signal port coming out of here for emergencies." Axl had said that, but Rock barely believed it.

"Why?" Rock stepped closer and squatted to look over Axl's shoulder. Axl was down on his knees with his arms deep inside the elevator's wiring. It wasn't taking him much time to plug into diagnostics and then quickly test all of the connectors. Rock was impressed. He'd heard about Axl growing up in Red Alert, a paramilitary organisation tasked most often with infiltration and extraction missions, but had never seen much evidence apart from bullseye marksmanship flung at moving targets.

"It was part of Noah company code. So the Jakob Project got it too. Most of these private elevators were used for the board, CEO, other top cadres. Private elevator convos got around government wire taps and required surveillance from the maverick prevention codes, basically."

"Wow. You know a lot about it."

"I eh..." Axl felt his shoulders shiver with Rock looking at his work so closely. He finished his repairs, quickly punching the old school ATX power unit into the ancient motherboard. The elevator resumed rising. "Wow, it's fixed! I just punched it, you know? Just punch old technology until it works again, that's what they say."

Axl stood back up, grinning widely. Rock looked up at him through his big brown bangs, then shook his head. Axl always acted like a kid. Rock stood up too.

"You're not going to punch me, right?"

"Course not, Rock! Gosh!"

"What if I go maverick?" Rock laughed, covering his mouth.

"Rock, you're—" Axl threw up his arms just as they swiped at his sides where his guns should have been. His eyes rolled. He'd been reconstructed, it was a hundred years later, and still the whole moon was supposed to keep up a dumb fiction that only Red Alert hunted mavericks just so Rock would remain innocent and X wouldn't get embarrassed. "I'm not in Red Alert any more. No more going after mavericks."

"No more mavericks," Rock corrected.

"Yeah. Right." Axl crossed his arms behind his head and laid back against the elevator wall. Rock was still smiling to himself, probably thinking how Super Nice it was that the concept of maverick didn't exist on the moon. Axl sputtered air out between his lips. Yeah, it was easy to say there's no difference between maverick and normal when everyone's maverick. All of them. The whole moon. Even Zero. Even Axl himself. Maybe even X.

X who was back now. X who was the most important person ever. X who had built a world for reploids and humans to finally live in peace, apart from human government, even apart from Hunter HQ. X who had gathered like minded reploids and humans and their mechaniloid helpers around him to strike out with a grand new plan for a safe zone amid the crumbling human societies and endless reploid war. X who had made his grand future from scratch, of his own volition, without human guidance, and against multiple international treaties. X who believed in peace even when he was ordered not to.

Yeah, okay, X was _especially_ maverick.

By the time Axl had noticed, way back then, it had been too late. He'd been corrupted, worse than X. His starting state, and his upbringing in Red Alert, and his training and service in the Maverick Hunters, all of these screamed at him that he had to dispose of mavericks. Even if, his coding specifically said, the reploid built by Dr. Light went maverick. But Axl wasn't running just on those protocols any more. He couldn't kill X. He loved X.

The elevator finally opened. Its three occupants hurried out of it, and past grand double doors, into the large rotunda where X's welcoming party awaited. Already the room was bright with decoration, light, soft music, and formal clothes. X talked with his family members and Gate, but couldn't let go of Zero's gloved hand. Fefnir, Harpuia, and Leviathan crowded around X and Zero both, vying for X's other shoulder and his attentive smile. Wily, back in his male body, nursed a tumbler of scotch from the curve of a pink fainting couch. Light sat on the fainting couch's long end, eager to be part of the conversation that Bass was loudly dominating.

"Then BAM. Lumine punches him in the face. Like you're me or sumthin'," Bass said while elbowing Lumine's silver brocade obi. "Solving your problems with vi-o-lence is fun, right? Right?"

Lumine drank from his glass, while his orange eyes rounded to glance at the opening doorway.

"I was doing my part," Bass continued, miming with a heavy clank of his armoured hands, "beating the bolts out of Heaven's Army."

X looked politely disturbed behind quickly widened eyes. "I was helping them, Bass; they're not the ene— _Axl!_ "

X called and waved to the three bots exiting the elevator. Copy X waved back, Rock energetically called hello, but Axl rushed forward to try his very best to crush X with arms, legs and love. Axl held onto X like a koala bear, and yelled how much he missed him. Sure, it had only been a few months from Axl's time perspective, but dammit, he'd missed X. The hug finally ended with Axl's feet on the floor and his lips on X's.

"No one told me you were waking up tonight," Axl said, vibrating in place.

"No one told me either," X said. Lumine and Dr. Light laughed politely.

"We had a breakthrough and figured: why wait?" Dr. Wily said, then pointed with his glass at his younger son. "Zero was very eager to approve."

"Zero, you're such a greedy keener," Axl said along with a slap to Zero's unarmoured shoulder.

"I didn't do it on purpose." Zero weakly defended himself with a gruff voice.

"You got to him first." Axl was immediately at X's other side, flanking the older bot.

"Yeah. Like always." Zero smiled to himself first, but then made sure to catch X's eyes, finally Axl's. Cheeky.

"You wanna fight? I'll rip that weeb-kilt right off of you," Axl said with playfully sour eyes aimed at Zero's Japanese outfit.

"Hakama," Lumine corrected.

"His idea," Zero grunted, indicating Lumine with his chin, head held high.

"Zero's idea," Lumine corrected again. He took another long, shallow sip of his drink. Zero kept staring forward as if ignoring Lumine's words would make them disappear before Axl could hear them. Axl laughed loudly.

X felt like crying. "I missed hearing you, Axl," X said.

"Zero says I was out for a while," Axl said.

"Hunter HQ, no, really the humans: they wouldn't let us put you back together because you were too damaged. They said we couldn't possibly get any data back. I saw you torn to pieces, and broken up into bits and... how?"

"Jeez, ask Zero."

"That can wait. I j-j-just want to be happy right now."

"Oh man, now you're sounding like the copy!" Axl pointed at the copy X who was trying to hide behind the table of refreshments with a glass of water and a small energised biscuit.

"I only stutter when I'm..."

"He only stutters when he's nervous!" Rock finished for X. "Or really happy I guess."

"He talks weird when he's about to cry because he's a giant softie," Zero said, placing his arm around X's shoulders. Axl immediately mirrored him, making an X-wich.

"Am not," X protested ineffectually. He was already blushing softly. All the same, he raised his voice slightly to catch the attention of the reploid who was trying to slink from the room. "Other X? Can we talk?"

"I don't think there's m-much to say. I d-don't belong here," the copy X said. He'd placed the police cap on his head and the matching cloak over his shoulders so he cold hold his glass and work tablet. He didn't want to stick around for much more if people were going to watch him steal biscuits.

"Of course you do," X said. "This is a place for all reploids. My father has said wonderful things about you. How you keep working hard to find a new place in the world."

"I'm his father too," Dr. Light said. "If he's based on you, then he might as well be my son. Isn't that right?"

"Isn't that right, what?" Copy X prompted.

"Um, what?" Light looked confused.

"You're supposed to call someone by their name after that. Isn't that right, Dr. Light. Isn't that right, Zero. So what's my name? Why don't you call me by my name?" Copy X finished his water and put it down quickly. He was glaring at the large old man pretending to be a reploid. Dr. Light still looked lost.

"Well, it's just that, erm, he's X." Light indicated X. "So you're..."

"I under-er-stand. I'm not-t X. I'm nobody." Copy X strode toward the large double doors, fixing to leave.

"Wait, Copy!" Light impulsively called after him.

Copy X turned on his heel violently. "Great, I'm Copy: I'm just a copy. No one ever took me seriously!" He turned right back around, stomping louder on the floor with each step.

"No, you did _wonderfully_ ," X said, stepping away from Zero and Axl with great worried eyes.

X was forced to chase his copy out into the hall. X caught him by the shoulder, but the copy wrenched himself out of the light hold. But X had at least gotten his attention under a hateful gaze. Copy X scowled, but said nothing.

"You did wonderfully," X repeated. "You took care of the humans while I was gone. I thought the humans would form a society based on the principles I left behind in Arcadia's constitution, but they made you instead. That's fine. You lead them, and you thought of their safety. You did everything you did in order to protect them, I know."

"You... you do know?" Copy X could hardly believe the words or their sincerity, but that face identical to his was stretched in emotion and hands that made his mould clenched anxiously.

"You couldn't see me, but I watched you work. If I'd really hated what you were doing, I would have talked to you, not Ciel."

"But you helped her," Copy X accused.

"She also wanted the best for the humans, and the reploids. You'd forgotten to be kind to them too. And by the time that happened, I was too busy helping Ciel with her energy research, because I'm an energy being, and... I let you down, I know."

"You can't let me down. I _was_ you." Copy X pointed indignantly. "Everyone said I was X. My prog-g-gramming says I'm X. I'm X-s-s. I'm you. You're dead."

"I'm not dead."

"No. You don't get to talk-k back." Copy X put up a finger, stabbing the air in front of X's face. "I came online, and I knew that I was the ruler of Neo Arcadia. It's mine, and it had b-been forever. Forever. I know everything about it.  
"I'm X, I'm really fully X in every way that counts to everyone who's alive. Then that Zero comes around and I'm a copy? Suddenly I'm not who I am? Just because he says so? Then the whole m-moon says I'm not me? I'm me! I've lived being m-me!  
"I remember things from my past just fine. Maverick Hunters. Elf Wars. Even Zero. Gee, even D-Dynamo! You say: h-hey, remember Dr. Cain? I know his face. I remember Signas and Alia, and how they were deba-b-batably dating, a situation made complex by Gate. It's all in my memory banks! I remember being me! _I'm X!_ " Copy X pointed to his head angrily. He was screaming.

"You're working from implanted memories. Ciel told me all about it. They're all taken from the Volteel server, official records, and social media posts, and then your interpolator subsystem edited them to add self-agency. So you feel like you experienced them, but—"

" _Bug off!_ " Copy X slapped X's face, then dashed away.

X was left wondering where he'd gone wrong with the bot who was supposed to be him. Since he'd first learned of the copy's existence, he'd thought about this encounter, planning it hypothetically in great detail. He thought of how he would like to learn of being a copy. As a large piece of software, he had to think about that eventuality. He knew, from many tortured days of self-reflection, that he would only want the truth. He should open with acceptance. Then he would follow with truth. Then he would end with love. But the copy had run off before X could say that being a copy didn't matter, and that all X wanted was to welcome him to the family as his own person, apart from being X, and only being him, in whatever way that he would choose to make himself. Wouldn't being his own person be freeing? Isn't it freeing to _not_ be X, with all the responsibilities and sorrows that attend it?

"You done messed up, X," Blues said. X didn't even turn around to face him. He knew Blues would walk out of the shadows soon.

"I guess I did," X said.

"You done messed up, X. You messed up. You have messed up now." Blues predictably stepped into the light, his yellow scarf cast into a faint green by the blue stained glass of the overshadowing gothic window.

"All right, fine, I messed up. Do you have any solution to this problem or are you here to mock me on my first day back?" 

"I'm here to chew you out."

"I'm going back to the party." As X started toward the bright end of the hallway, Blues caught his shoulder, then secured his grip onto X's arm.

"I told them I'd talk to you."

"I think daddy will have better advice."

"That doesn't actually matter. We need to talk."

X relaxed his body in Blues hold. He wasn't getting away from this, it seemed.

"What is it?" X asked, expression dark and flattened.

"You tried to kill yourself, X."

"I didn't." X stiffened again. Blues turned his body so they could talk eye to eye. The blue light of the window bisected X's face and bled his body into the hallway.

"I was there after the Zeroes fought. You were giving the last of your energy, the only thing keeping your data together, to repair the copy Zero. I read your lips. You said goodbye. I knew ever since I caught you at the base, you were planning to die. It figured you'd do something that stupid, just for Zero, any Zero."

"I love him..."

"You're stupid and selfish, X." Blues grabbed X with both red hands. "You try to fight everything yourself. Why? You think no one else can handle it, or do it as well as you? Martyrdom is selfish. It's so you don't have to ask for help, or work as a team, even though that's all you talk about. So other people get to work together for the good of humans, but then you have to shoulder everything yourself? And then when it turns out that's actually hard, and you've let everyone leave you, you go ahead and leave them. It's too hard being X, so you run away."

"That's not true, Blues!"

"It's very true. You did it before you met Axl. Then he makes you and Zero feel better for a while, after both of you were busy having a Leave Everything Breakdown. And he probably never knew how broken you two were, because you're big maverick hunter an heroes."

"Blues," X hissed.

"You need to hear this, X. So you can get over yourself and adapt to the world too. Cause congrats: you changed the world. Now you have to change with it."

"What about you? You're the oldest robot here, and you've never changed."

"This isn't about me. It's about you. We all thought you were the copy X, and then I'm going around doing research for the old man when I find out you've sealed yourself away. Yeah, great job. Become an ELF, great job, one step removed from life. Then you go and throw it all away again. I told you, wile you were doing it: you had enough energy to just stabilise him and live. Then there you went synthesizing a new vest and shit for him. We had your back. We could have helped, and you _knew_ that because I told you we were there."

"He needed everything I gave him!"

"He needed you to be alive. Zero needs you to be alive. You're with him this morning and you don't understand that? You can't expect him to carry on without you just because you make a heroic speech. That's not what love is."

Blues let go of X. X stared at him for a long time.

"Don't make me worry like that again," Blues said.

X sighed, then walked back to the party.

In the following months, X settled into an administrative role in the lunar government. He was used to such paperwork and trivialities from both Hunter HQ and running a resistance then Arcadia. Humans and reploids alike had to deal with working to code, and file progress reports, and coördinate with each other's schedules, and write up contracts, and share literature with the archives on science and culture. Everyone on the Moon was so very busy, or busy having fun. The colony felt so full of life it could burst.

Sometimes the colony seemed a bit too full of life for X's emotional comfort. Seeing reploids he'd once destroyed pass through his office and walk by him in the halls once again filled him with a mix of dread, relief, and hope. Some of them yelled at him again, since he'd killed them. X let it happen, and trained himself in patience and forgiveness.

X thought of running away to the dark maré with Zero and Axl, away from these hectic encounters ripped from his past. They could stay in some of the old Soviet lunar pods Bass had found. They could live together, catching stray Earth junk from orbit and mining for materials, then bringing what was worthwhile back to the colony. Mets did that. Stone Man, Shade Man, Galaxy Man, and Junk Man did that. Bass did that sometimes. It was a legitimate way of life. But X couldn't suggest it, he decided conclusively, because that would be running away. X had decided not to run away any more.

Zero happily became X's assistant, although he spent more time than he was expecting in the unofficial job of someone for the other combat oriented robots to fight. Some days it felt like pokémon out there, with tournaments, and crows cheering from inside the bio-domes, and humans acting as "navigators" for their teams. In a time of peace like the Moon had, the only uses for energy pellets were for riveting and friendly fire-fights held at such a low energy that they wouldn't even singe arm hair. Zero wondered about the future of combat on the Moon. Would humans forget how to truly fight, such that fighting became an art form of discipline and dance, until the day that some catastrophe would force them to see robots in a true battle? Or would human avarice rear its ugly head once again after such a long sleep, ending in murder and gang warfare? Zero never believed in utopia. So it would take effort to keep the humans innocent. And if games did that, then so be it. It was all Quick Man's idea anyway.

Copy X did everything he could to avoid X, including having Axl run his paper reports for him. In his archival memory, Axl was a vague historical footnote, a new team member who had joined Hunter HQ, who was friends with X. The copy could clearly see now that Axl was so very much more to the first X, but magnanimously decided not to hold that against him. The sting of Axl having tricked him into a job as the humans' policeman faded quickly as the copy X found the job absolutely perfect to his liking. Solving petty disputes as judge, jury, and executioner, even if they were usually about lost clothes or cats, gave him a sense of belonging in power and place that he would never abandon. So Axl was back on his good list as an ally who, either through shrewdness or utter vapidity, didn't say a thing about the copy X being a copy. Axl had even started calling him Copper instead, as a job title. Although a pejorative, being a copper was far superior to being an imposter. When Axl walked right into his Copper's office without announcement, he got away with it.

"Hey, Copper, they want us back at the tower," Axl said. He leant onto the one police desk, and his empty courier bag flopped on it as well. His plating was still hot from running and his back jets still smelled from gliding.

"Any idea what it's about?" Copy X asked, shutting down his data input window that held a report on last night's noise violation.

"Nope. Let's get out of here anyway, eh?"

"Can you fly me? My legs are still at half strength from rounds last night."

"Sure, princess." Axl joked, but squatted anyway so the other could climb on. Before they jetted up over the clustered peaks of human houses, the "Office Closed" sign miraculously managed to turn on.

The mood at the tower was tense. Freeze Man and Ice Man came down the stairs together like they were sneaking away with heavy weights. Axl ran his hands behind his head in an arc to approximate Lumine's hair or Bass' helmet. Freeze Man shook his head. If it wasn't a run of the mill fight for Rock's attention that ended in Lumine publicly banishing Bass, that actually made things worse. EM fields all over the tower were off kilter. Zero was yelling from a few floors up. Axl would've given anything to be called to witness the intentionally performative farce of a domestic dispute instead.

Copy X and Axl followed Zero's voice into an antechamber of the Earth observatory room. Bass was sitting on the floor by the doorway, cross-legged, eyes closed, annoyed. Lumine stood on the opposite side, cross-armed, with the wall pushing his hair down. Lumine slowly mouthed "Don't go. Nnnnooo." while twitching a finger at the door and thinning his eyes. Axl raised his palms in the "What? I don't understand?" gesture. When Dr. Light's voice stopped rumbling, Zero's started again, and Axl understood.

"No, I have to be me again! He has my brains in him. He has my black box. I deserve to have it back! It has me in it, don't you want me all in one piece, X? Dammit, how many times do I have to say this?" Zero's voice rattled the observatory's glass walls along with the side of his fist.

"What about letting him be himself, Zero?" X responded to Zero. They both sounded tired of the argument. "We let the copy me be himself. Shouldn't the copy you get that chance?"

"He can get the chance without my black box."

"It's the only thing providing him basic function!"

"Wily can give him something else. Heck, stick his memory stick in that extra body of his."

"What if he doesn't want to be in a woman's body?" Wily's voice rejoined, obviously not invested in the fight beyond making it worse by habit.

"Well beggars can't be choosers," Zero spat.

"I think they're here," Roll's voice said with firm but level words.

"Boys, you can come in," Light said.

Copy X and Axl exchanged a look with each other. When they tried to share it with Lumine, he had his head turned away. In this on their own. They entered.

An array of large telescopes on their gigantic wheels dominated the glass-paned observatory. Zero and X sat on separate telescopes. Roll straddled the one between them, obviously fed up. On the floor, Wily ran through the same folder of files on an old solid-state screen in a steady rhythm. Layer sat glumly next to him at the main console, hands gripping her knees, and her entire downcast face hidden by purple hair. Light and Rock stood in the middle of the room like lost chickens.

"You're here," Roll said. "They've been at this for an hour."

"It's my fault," Rock said. "I was looking over last night's data, following the space station crash, since I wanted to make sure no human was hurt and all, and then I saw him. And I told dad."

"Who?" Axl asked.

"Copy Zero," Copy X supplied his best inference.

"Yes," Dr. Light confirmed, "and I wanted to contact Ciel, although he's in terrible shape. But we can fix him."

"Leave Him On Earth," Wily gave his position in a sing-song voice.

"But don't you want Zero to be fixed, with all his parts in place?" Axl asked.

"He can live without Black Box #3. It's obviously Not A Problem for lovebirds."

"It's a problem because I want my century back," Zero argued.

"We can reconstruct it based on X's memories and the Volteel archives like in the other X." Wily tapped the end of his stylus against the screen's plastic face, held between two fingers like an elegant cigarette. "It's really not a problem. If we get involved now, it'll be another political problem. I'm almost done reconstructing your advanced sensory processors, data collation, and self diagnostics. You won't need the box either."

"We can't decide whether to even tell Ciel about this. I think we should," Roll explained, resting her chin in her hands as her elbows balanced on the telescope between her knees.

"If we tell Ciel about him," Copy X said with calculated derision, "and if we can even fix him, she'll use him to fight again. Is that what we want to happen?"

"Ciel's doesn't want us to help, and she won't even respond to our messages, because she thinks we're in league with Dr. Weil. Because we helped Neo Arcadia," Roll said.

"Because we helped you," Zero said.

"Don't be rude, [Wofür-Kämpfe-Ich](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OVv-J-LXQU)," Wily said. A weak _ja, Vater_ came from above.

"But if we fixed Zero for her, we could reconstruct our ties with Earth," Roll said. "That's what everyone wants, right?"

"And we have to hurry because he's in really, really bad shape," Rock said, voice high with worry.

"I think he's beyond repair," Wily said. He swivelled his chair to the side so the newcomers could see the satellite image on the screen. Bits of red strewn across the bleached earth barely poked out of sand and cold grey debris. Only the copy Zero's destroyed helmet remained basically recognisable.

"I think we should at least try," Light said. He turned to Axl and the copy X, body language pleading for an answer.

"There's nine of us. We can vote. And we can do it quick," Rock said.

"We have lots of things to vote on, but okay," Roll said, sitting up. "Those in favour of telling Ciel we found his remains?" Roll raised her own hand; so did Light, X, and Rock. Copy X, Wily, Zero, and Layer went against. Roll cleared her throat. "Axl?"

"I don't even know who Ciel is, really?" Axl said. "But if we can't even fix the other Zero in the end, we shouldn't get her hopes up, eh? So— I guess I'm against."

"Okay. Majority rules," Roll conceded. "Those in favour of retrieving the remains?" A clear majority of hands went up, with only Wily refusing.

"Those in favour of extracting Black Box #3 and the original Zero's memory stick from the copy Zero?"

Zero's hand went up before Roll finished speaking. Layer's hand followed his, but slowly. Light raised his hand next. Rock raised his with certainty.

"I mean, if we're going to retrieve him?" Wily said while shaking his hand noncommittally.

"That doesn't help anyone," Zero snapped.

"I was in favour of leaving the pieces there and fixing you myself. If the pieces are all broken, or the drives corrupted by the heat of atmospheric reëntry, it's all worthless anyway." Wily shrugged.

"Those in favour are Zero, Layer, Rock, and Light," Roll said. "Do we count X, other X, and Axl against?"

"What about yourself?" X asked.

"I just don't know. I want the Zero we all got to know back, but what about the life the other Zero lived? Aren't we here to save everyone?"

"I want to keep the other Zero as is," the copy X said.

"You actually want that copy Zero to stick around?" Zero asked, offended. "He fought against us. He did nothing but try to destroy Neo Arcadia. What's wrong with you?"

"Maybe I'm more like a real X than you think."

"I actually want to keep him too," Axl said loudly. He very quickly felt everyone's eyes on him like an icy fog penetrating his plating. "I think he should stay alive, as his own person."

"You do?" X asked.

"Are all of you— is the plan to take out the parts that were from Zero, and leave everything else as scrap?"

"Yeah, that was the plan," Zero said.

"We were going to vote on that next," Roll said.

"So, yeah, I think he should stay as he is," Axl said haltingly. Making speeches instead of quips was never his forte. "You can still be yourself, or another person all on your own, even when you have someone else inside you, or built on them a bit. I, uh, I know what it's like to have a part of someone else in me."

"Do you mean the copy ability?" Light asked.

"That would lend Axl a unique perspective," X said.

"We can take the black box, and give it back to Zero with his memory stick too, but the parts, um, the parts of memory that the other Zero made are his, eh? Can't he have 'em, copied? X told us that he didn't remember anything, eh? But we can still let him have what he lived." Axl could still feel everyone stare. "Aww jeez, I'm no good at this."

"No, we can do that, depending on how much of him is left," Wily said. The end of his pen was now meeting the table for two deep clicks.

"Then can we? Can that be the plan?" Axl asked.

"What if he tries to destroy the moon like he destroyed Neo Arcadia?" Zero accused.

"He wouldn't do that," X said. He rolled to the side on his telescope seat, grabbing tightly onto it so as not to fall while he implored Zero. "I know that Zero. I'm the one who sent him to do all that. Be angry at me."

Zero made a sound in his throat, turning to face X the same way. But his words were quickly lost. Zero dropped down from his telescope then in one quick bounce clambered up to X's. Zero straddled the giant eyepiece while X sat curled above him on the lens end. X was framed by the rectangle of light cast by the observatory's opening, looking regal yet scared. X shouldn't look scared, Zero knew.

"I can't be angry at you, X," Zero said. "You did what you thought was right. And I know..." Zero pulled hair out of his face, then slid his ponytail over his shoulder to calm himself. "What you think is right always ends up being right. I'm wrong."

"It doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong," Roll said with a bit of a huff. Those two could maybe wait a little while before making moony eyes at each other, on the moon. "Are we all okay with Axl's plan?"

"Sounds good to me; all in favour—" Wily raised his hand, eager to get the meeting over.

"I'm in favour," Layer said softly, raising her hand as well next to Wily's. Wily looked over at her, a bit surprised. He was sure she just voted following Zero.

"Okay, great," Zero said loudly. He knew when he was outvoted. "I'm fine with it as long as I get my parts back. Anyone against?"

No hands went up. With the decision finally reached, there was a general murmur of congratulation. Zero climbed up the telescope so he could scoop X into his arms. They then both fell off of the polished bronze and crashed on the floor with a sound much harsher than the actual impact. Their giggles came from behind the large gears driving the telescope's angles and movement. Roll looked down to see them missing one another on and off between nuzzling noses. She relaxed her grip on the central telescope and slid down it with a truly nonplussed look. She could faintly hear them talk between tiny kissing sounds as she let the room to begin the rescue mission.

"What if you love him like you love me?" Zero asked.

"I care for him but not," X spoke between sweet kisses, "oh Zero, not like you. I love you in ways he could never know."

"Yeesh, what am I, chopped liver?" Axl said loudly from across the room. Copy X snuck out behind him, following Roll.

X sat up, the top of his head finally visible from between two great wheels. "Oh, Axl, I didn't mean to exclude you! I love you, of course. Why don't we all go back to my room?"

"Naw. I still gotta get some diamonds over to the machine sanding place. I'll see you before dinner. Maybe we can eat out together." Axl waved, backing up out the door with a wink.

"Daddy, come on, Roll will need help," Rock called. Light and Rock left right after Axl.

Wily looked over to Layer, who was blushing under her long bangs. Behind her and the console, X and Zero had gone back to being in love, neither of them in sight as X shushed away Zero's fears. Wily scooted his chair closer to Layer by pulling his upper body along the console.

"So, you wanted to date my son, Zero, I hear," Wily spoke close to Layer's ear.

"Yes," Layer mumbled. She could hear X and Zero kissing.

"Why don't we go for a drink."

Layer looked fully at Wily, surprised. He was leaning over the console, cheek in his palm, pinkie finger over his lower lip, eyes lowered like a leopard on the hunt. His right hands slid up his thigh to his knee with spread fingers. She'd seen a lot of men look at her like that. She'd thought better of Wily. Especially for all the times she'd seen him in Light's arms on security cameras. She'd turned down a lot of men for drinks.

"I don't think we should," Layer said.

"No really, let's get out of here," Wily said. He bobbed his head in the direction of X and Zero's loving sounds.

Layer wasn't keen on letting him lead her somewhere to be trapped, but she did want to get out for privacy's sake. So, Layer stood and headed to the door, nodding at Wily. He followed, exiting his chair and joining her side in one smooth motion. When they passed the observatory doorway, Bass had left muddy tracks back out into the hall and out of an open window. Lumine and Axl were talking softly further down the hall. Wily turned in the opposite direction, a hand gently at Layer's shoulder. Layer walked out of the touch.

"I should report to Alia," Layer said.

"But don't you see? There's two Zeroes now," Wily said. He walked slightly faster, just ahead of her to catch her eye with his amused face. Layer was surprised again. She had no idea what he was even going after now. "What about Zero did you particularly like?"

Oh, there was a pickup attempt. Get her to describe a dream guy, then turn the description back onto himself. Layer stopped walking.

"I don't want to date you, Dr. Albert Wilhelm Wily," Layer said.

"Look, you're very beautiful, but I don't want to date you either." Wily waved his hand in the air. "I'm just saying that if we copy Zero's memory, and leave a copy with this other Zero, that's the Zero from the time you first met him and had a gigantic crush on him, right?"

Layer thought about that selfishly for a moment before she had to strengthen herself again. "That sounds highly immoral."

"Not so." Wily rested one hand on his hips, large nose held high, while the other he held out before him, counting. "Fact: if Zero remembers everything, he'll be in love with X. Fact: X will turn him down. Fact: he'll have fond memories of you. Fact: even if he remembers nothing, you're still a good woman any man could love. Fact: This•Is•Your•Chance." Wily's other hand fell back to his hips to make a match pair. "So just tell what about Zero attracted you. I'll be reprogramming him. I think there's more to you than I previously thought. So enlighten me."

"That still sounds immoral."

"Hmmn. Listen, you saw the satellite feed. Let me speak to you as a robotics expert: he's more broken than fixed. Either way, he'll need fresh personality drivers because one black box isn't enough to have him emote or even feel emotion better than a block of wood, and although I have seen some charismatic logs in my time, that won't be him. Unless silent, stoic, and brooding really is your type."

"No," Layer said quickly and with more confidence. "I liked Zero because he was, well he was very cool. And handsome. I thought he was heroic, strong, intense, funny, cute, and the sadness in his past made him..." Layer let out a heavy breath. "You should install drivers in the new Zero. It would be horrible to live without being able to really feel, and let emotions lead you into stupid mistakes like getting a crush on an S-Rank hunter. But let him figure out his emotions on his own."

"Let me tell you, if sad backstories are your thing, this Zero will be a doozy."

"I don't want you to change someone for me."

"Oh dear, oh dear, it seems you've been misunderstanding me, Layer. I simply want to reconstruct him as he was. And I want him to have someone he can trust. X is back in the arms of the Zero that remembers him, the copy X naturally hates the man who killed his people, Zero hates him for being a copy, and everyone else is quite neutral, even if they're humanitarian enough to allow him to live."

"Can't he trust you?"

"Ah, but I'm always busy with my own blue eyed idiot." Wily touched his chest, eyebrows upturned in self-deprecation. "I was just thinking the new Zero, who would remember you if we can fix him, might need someone he remembers from his past who won't suddenly despise him. Acclimating the copy X to the moon was enough of a headache. I don't suppose you could do me a small favour and look out for the little Zero. Are you not a navigator?"

"You want me to guide him?"

"It's your chance—" Wily smiled and backed away, letting his words sink in for just a beat. "To do some true good in the world. I trust you. You can really help him, Layer."

Layer touched her lower lip and chin, thinking. Copy Zero would be new and old at once. He'd be torn out of both the pat and the future, in a confusing and hostile environment. X had talked about mentoring him in the resistance. X had told stories of how sad his life was, where the copy didn't know himself, or his past, or how to belong. If the copy Zero remembered more, he'd be even more lost. Poor Zero. He really did need a navigator.

"All right, I'll help him, Dr. Wily."

"I'm so very glad," Wily said, grasping Layer's hand in thanks with a soft look in his eyes. Layer didn't move her hand, instead nodding in agreement while looking the the side. Her thoughts were obviously on Zero. Wily remarked on how easy it still was to play people.


End file.
